Anti-Portraiture: Challenging the Limits of the Portrait 9781784534127, 9781350193062, 9781350193055

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Figures
Contributors
Acknowledgements
1 Introducing the anti-portrait (Fiona Johnstone and Kirstie Imber)
2 Decapitations: The portrait, the anti-portrait … and what comes after? (Michael Newman)
3 An anti-portraitist in the realm of letters: Gertrude Stein’s theory of seeing (Ery Shin)
4 ‘A whole man, made of all men’: Giacometti, existentialism and the ‘singular universal’ (Véronique Wiesinger)
5 ‘Closeness, or the appearance of closeness’: Robert Morris’s critical self-portraits and the expanding artworld of 1960s Ame
6 Subjects unknown: Found images and the depersonalization of portraiture (Ella Mudie)
7 Subject/object: Seeking the self in Susan Aldworth’s portraits of schizophrenia (Julia Beaumont-Jones)
8 Hiding in plain sight: Gazing at Laura Swanson’s Anti-Self-Portraits (Kristin Lindgren)
9 Filling the narrative void: Material portraits in the Chilean post-dictatorship (Megan Corbin)
10 Relics, remains and other objects: Non-mimetic portraiture in the age of aids (Fiona Johnstone)
Index

Citation preview

Anti-Portraiture

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Anti-Portraiture Challenging the Limits of the Portrait Edited by Fiona Johnstone and Kirstie Imber

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Fiona Johnstone and Kirstie Imber, 2020 Fiona Johnstone and Kirstie Imber have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xiii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image Laura Swanson, White (2007), from the series Anti-Self-Portraits (2005–2008). Inkjet print, 20 x 30 inches. © Laura Swanson. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Johnstone, Fiona, editor. | Imber, Kirstie, editor. Title: Anti-portraiture : challenging the limits of the portrait / edited by Fiona Johnstone and Kirstie Imber. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020. | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020032041 (print) | LCCN 2020032042 (ebook) | ISBN 9781784534127 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350193055 (pdf) | ISBN 9781350192768 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Portraits–Philosophy. Classification: LCC N7575 .A58 2020 (print) | LCC N7575 (ebook) | DDC 704.9/42–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020032041 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020032042 ISBN: HB: 978-1-7845-3412-7 ePDF: 978-1-3501-9305-5 eBook: 978-1-3501-9276-8 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Romilly, Esther, Orla and Angus

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Contents List of figures  List of contributors  Acknowledgements  1 Introducing the anti-portrait  Fiona Johnstone and Kirstie Imber  2 Decapitations: The portrait, the anti-portrait … and what comes after?  Michael Newman  3 An anti-portraitist in the realm of letters: Gertrude Stein’s theory of seeing  Ery Shin  4 ‘A whole man, made of all men’: Giacometti, existentialism and the ‘singular universal’  Véronique Wiesinger  5 ‘Closeness, or the appearance of closeness’: Robert Morris’s critical self-portraits and the expanding artworld of 1960s America  David Hodge  6 Subjects unknown: Found images and the depersonalization of portraiture  Ella Mudie  7 Subject/object: Seeking the self in Susan Aldworth’s portraits of schizophrenia  Julia Beaumont-Jones  8 Hiding in plain sight: Gazing at Laura Swanson’s Anti-Self-Portraits Kristin Lindgren  9 Filling the narrative void: Material portraits in the Chilean post-dictatorship  Megan Corbin  10 Relics, remains and other objects: Non-mimetic portraiture in the age of AIDS  Fiona Johnstone  Index 

viii ix xiii 1 25 69 91

105 123 143 153 175 195 217

Figures 1.1 1.2 1.3 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 6.1 6.2 6.3 7.1 7.2 8.1 8.2 9.1 9.2 9.3 1 0.1 10.2

Marc Quinn, Sir John Edward Sulston (2001)  Grayson Perry, A Map of Days (2013)  Maija Tammi, One of Them Is a Human #1, Erica (2017)  Brian O’Doherty, Portrait of Marcel Duchamp: Mounted Cardiogram 4/4/66 (1966)  Mel Bochner, Portrait of Eva Hesse (1966)  Kazz Sasaguchi, detail from Constellation (2002)  Mark Wallinger, Self (Times New Roman) (2010)  Donald Rodney, Self-Portrait: Black Men Public Enemy (1990)  Joscelyn Gardner, Coffee arabica (Clarissa) (2011) from the series Creole Portraits III (2009–11)  Erica Scourti, detail from The Outage: Her Story (2014)  Susan Morris, De Umbris Idearum [of the Shadow Cast by Our Thoughts] (2019)  Gerhard Richter, Confrontation 2 (1988)  Tacita Dean, Edwin Parker (2011)  Luc Tuymans, The Diagnostic View IV (1992)  Susan Aldworth, Reassembling the Self 1 (2012)  Susan Aldworth, Reassembling the Self 7 (2012)  Laura Swanson, White (2007), from the series Anti-Self-Portraits (2005–8)  Laura Swanson, Coat (2005), from the series Anti-Self-Portraits (2005–8)  The Muro de Memoria, under the Puente Bulnes, Chile  Memorial to Marta Lidia Ugarte Román, Sala de la Memoria, Villa Grimaldi, Chile  Memorial to Jacqueline Paulette Drouilly Yurich, Sala de la Memoria, Villa Grimaldi, Chile  Barton Lidicé Beneš, Brenda (detail) (1993)  Barton Lidicé Beneš, Reliquarium (1999) 

5 6 7 30 32 33 36 44 46 52 56 129 134 137 147 149 154 164 179 187 188 200 204

Contributors Julia Beaumont-Jones is a curator and writer specializing in British prints and drawings. She has curated exhibitions including the Royal Air Force Museum’s In Air and Fire: War Artists, the Battle of Britain and the Blitz (2020), York Art Gallery’s Ruskin, Turner and the Storm Cloud (2019) and shows of contemporary painting and printmaking at Art Space Gallery, Islington, as well as numerous Tate Britain collection displays as former manager of Tate’s Prints and Drawings Rooms. She is the author of A Century of Prints in Britain (2017). Megan Corbin is Associate Professor in the Department of Languages and Cultures at West Chester University (WCU). She joined WCU after receiving her doctorate from the University of Minnesota. Her primary area of research centres around the post-dictatorship periods of the Southern Cone of Latin America and examines the ways in which individuals, groups and society are working to fill gaps in historical memory through literary and artistic practices. David Hodge is an independent art historian. From 2014 to 2019 he was Head of Art History, Theory and Contextual Studies at The Art Academy, a fine art school in London. David completed his PhD on the work of Robert Morris at the University of Essex in 2015. David has published essays in Art History, Oxford Art Journal, Sculpture Journal, e-flux and other publications. He is currently finalizing a manuscript on the concept of ‘art practice’. Kirstie Imber is an art historian with research interests in the intersection of art, politics and law. Her doctoral thesis examined issues around voice, free speech and censorship in the works of contemporary Iranian women artists such as Samira Eskandarfar, Mandana Moghaddam, Newsha Tavakolian and Neda Razavipour, and she has recently published chapters in Censoring Art: Silencing the Artwork (2018) and Music, Art and Performance from Liszt to Riot Grrrl: The Musicalization of Art (2018). Fiona Johnstone is an art historian specializing in the relationship between art, health and medicine. She is currently working on a monograph for Bloomsbury, AIDS & Representation:  Portraits and Self-Portraits during the AIDS Crisis in America. She completed an AHRC-funded PhD on self-portraits by HIV-positive

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artists in 2015 and has published in a number of journals, essay collections and exhibition catalogues, including Third Text (2011) and Changing Difference (2012). Kristin Lindgren directs the Haverford Writing Center and teaches literature, writing and disability studies at Haverford College, outside Philadelphia, PA. She is co-editor of two books about Deaf culture, Signs and Voices and Access, and author of numerous journal articles and essays. She has contributed chapters to books including Gendering Disability, Illness in the Academy, Disability and the Teaching of Writing, Transforming the Academy, Disability and Mothering and the series A Cultural History of Disability. She co-organized the art exhibitions What Can a Body Do? (2012) and Prison Obscura (2014) and co-curated Consent to Be Seen (2016), all at Haverford College. She wrote the catalogue essay, “Drama Queen,” for Laura Swanson (2017) at the Attenborough Arts Centre, UK. Ella Mudie is an arts writer based in Sydney with broad interests across the visual arts, literature, architecture and design. In 2015, she received her PhD from the University of New South Wales for an interdisciplinary thesis focused on psychogeography and the novel. Ella has published widely in scholarly journals, literary magazines, visual art publications and newspapers. Her essay on contemporary psychogeographical fiction appears in the edited collection, Twenty-first Century British Fiction and the City (2018). Michael Newman is Professor of Art Writing at Goldsmiths. He has written books on Richard Prince, Jeff Wall and Seth Price and co-edited Rewriting Conceptual Art (1999) and The State of Art Criticism (2007). He has published numerous essays on modern and contemporary artists, as well as thematic essays on the wound, the horizon, contingency, memory, the trace of drawing, nonsense, perversion and boredom. He is also the curator of several exhibitions including FIGURE/S: Drawing after Bellmer at The Drawing Room, London, due in 2021. Ery Shin is an assistant professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi. She specializes in modernism and avant-garde practices, with her first book, Gertrude Stein’s Surrealist Years (2020), exploring Stein’s later experimental gestures against the backdrop of Hitler’s Europe. Véronique Wiesinger is a French art historian and curator specializing in the relationship between art, politics, law and economics, with a special focus on sculpture. She has written books and essays on American artists in France,

Contributors

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on modern masters such as Giacometti and Picasso, and on contemporary artists such as Mimmo Paladino, Ettore Spalletti, Javier Pérez, Daniel Dewar and Gregory Gicquel (Marcel Duchamp Prize 2012). She co-edited a book on prominent dealer Denise René, Denise René. L’intrépide (2001), and was the curator of the Giacometti retrospective at the Pompidou Center (2007). From 2003 to 2014 she was the executive director of the Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, which she helped create. She is currently working on a book on sculpture and the French law 1793–2020.

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Acknowledgements We the editors would like to thank the artists, galleries and estates who agreed to let us reproduce images of their work without incurring reproduction charges:  Grayson Perry, Maija Tammi, Brian O’Doherty, Mel Bochner, Kazz Sasaguchi, Mark Wallinger, the Estate of Donald Rodney, Joscelyn Gardner, Erica Scourti, Susan Morris, Tacita Dean and Frith Steet Gallery, the Studio of Luc Tuymans, Susan Aldworth, Laura Swanson, the Estate of Barton Lidicé Beneš and Pavel Zoubok Gallery in New York. We are particularly grateful to Laura Swanson for the cover image and to Susan Morris for her enthusiastic support of this project from inception to publication. Part of the editing of this book was carried out during postdoctoral fellowships in the Department of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London; we are grateful to the department for providing the space to think, write and exchange ideas and would especially like to thank Suzannah Biernoff and Lynda Nead for advice on preparing the initial book proposal. We would like to thank all the contributors to this volume for their patience with the project and to recognize the support of a number of editors at I.B. Tauris and Bloomsbury Publishing, who have guided AntiPortraiture to its final form. We are grateful to the two anonymous manuscript reviewers for their incisive and valuable comments. Finally, Fiona Johnstone would like to acknowledge the intellectual and practical support of Paul Marks, and Kirstie Imber would like to thank Robert Dinsdale and Becky Sykes for their insightful comments on the concept of portraiture.

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Introducing the anti-portrait Fiona Johnstone and Kirstie Imber

This volume is dedicated to the anti-portrait, broadly conceived as a portrait that resists or disrupts the received art-historical conventions of its genre.1 Some anti-portraits retain a partial investment in figuration; others opt for a conceptual or object-based representation of their subject, evoking the sitter not through physiognomic likeness but through strategies that might include verbal or written inscription; the use of indexical or bodily traces, biodata or digital profiling; and many other forms of symbolic or metaphorical elicitation besides. Post-romantic notions of psychological or emotional depth may be interrogated; in many cases the anti-portrait is concerned with scrutinizing the operations of subjectivity, rather than expressing the particularized identity of a given individual. As a whole, however, this book is less concerned with arriving at an authoritative definition of the anti-portrait so much as considering the impact that these insubordinate artworks might have on an understanding of the genre as a whole. While the term ‘post-genre’ is now commonplace in literary studies, it has rarely been considered in relation to the discipline of art history. Jacques Derrida has remarked that ‘as soon as the word “genre” is sounded … a limit is drawn. And when a limit is established, norms and interdictions are not far behind.’2 The concept of genre therefore implies a desire to raise borders, regulate boundaries and eliminate impurities; fighting against this, however, is a reciprocal law, one of ‘contamination’ that makes it impossible not to mix genres. The anti-portrait embodies the compulsion to cross borderlines and sully ‘pure’ genres, even while paradoxically reflecting on and regulating the margins of its own. Also writing in relation to literature, Carolyn Miller has suggested that genre should be dependent not on substance or form but on the action that a text (or, in this case, an artwork) is used to accomplish.3 Following Miller, the question that the

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chapters in this volume seek to address is not ‘What does a portrait look like?’ but rather, ‘What can a portrait do?’ This is a timely moment for a critical (re)-evaluation of the anti-portrait, with several recent exhibitions in the UK and the United States suggesting a new institutional willingness to consider instances of portraiture that break with the genre’s historical ties to figuration and question its persistent associations with physical or emotional likeness. In the summer of 2017, the National Portrait Gallery in London mounted an exhibition of works by Howard Hodgkin, a British painter known primarily for abstraction. Advancing a direct challenge to the orthodoxy of the physiognomic portrait, the vast majority of works displayed in Howard Hodgkin:  Absent Friends were non-figurative (although almost all referred to known individuals). For example, Hodgkin’s Self-Portrait of the Artist (1984–7) is an abstract arrangement of vibrant green and magenta daubs on a stormy blue background, edged with rows of hazy yellow discs; nothing about the work implies a discernible human form. Controversially extolling Hodgkin as ‘one of the late twentieth-century’s greatest portraitists’, the curator Paul Moorhouse acknowledged that some observers ‘will inevitably not consider his paintings to be portraits at all’.4 In anticipation of the question:  ‘In what way can this be considered a portrait?’ Moorhouse suggests that the concept of resemblance has come to unfairly dominate the way in which we read paintings; for many, he notes, ‘there is an abiding conviction that in order to refer to something other than itself, a painting has to replicate the appearance of its subject’.5 He situates this view historically in relation to the rise of abstraction in the early twentieth century and its accompanying belief that the abstract painting has no referent outside of the artwork and exists solely on its own pictorial terms, a doctrine that still carries authority today. This, Moorhouse argues, is a misunderstanding that fails to account for the ability of the human mind ‘to read one thing as embodying or expressing another’. Our capacity for metaphorical thinking, Moorhouse concludes, means that the abstract form is ‘uniquely eloquent’,6 possessing expressive or associative qualities that can powerfully evoke (rather than directly depict) an individual human presence. Not everyone was convinced: the art critic for the Observer complained that Moorhouse ‘has had to perform some pretty high-level semantic gymnastics’ in order to justify the exhibition’s use of the word ‘portraiture’.7 While acknowledging that Hodgkin himself considered all these pictures to be portraits, the critic challenges the artist’s judgement in designating them as such. Picking on the work Absent Friends (2000–1), from which the exhibition takes its title, the critic



Introducing the Anti-Portrait

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objects: ‘To my eyes, this painting is not a portrait. Rather, it is an expression of what it means to miss someone.’8 This response to the exhibition implies a conception of portraiture based on what Hans Georg Gadamer has described as a work’s ‘occasionality’; that is, the intentional connection between the portrait image and the human original.9 The relationship established by Absent Friends is less between the image and its ostensible referent, as between the image and the emotional response that the sitters and their absence have induced in the artist. Put another way, Hodgkin’s sitters are here defined by their affective trace on the world rather than by their particularized individual identities, suggesting an understanding of personhood as fluid and unbounded, and generating radical new possibilities for the pictorial portrait.

What is a portrait (and does it have to look like someone)? Most people instinctively think that they know what a portrait is:  a likeness of a particular person, perhaps painted, photographed, sketched or sculpted, with various possible degrees of artistic skill or mimetic accuracy. This likeness might aim to express something about the sitter’s personality, emotional state or some other aspect of their ‘inner self ’; alternatively, it might convey a sitter’s social identity by drawing attention to, for example, a profession or familial role. In either case, the portrait is tacitly understood to communicate something important about a person through their visual re-presentation. These assumptions are supported by the standard textbook definitions of portraiture. For Richard Brilliant, writing in Portraiture (1991), portraits are ‘art works, intentionally made of living or once living people by artists, in a variety of media, and for an audience’.10 Brilliant’s book barely broaches the topic of nonfigurative portraits; he places significant emphasis on visual resemblance, noting that the term ‘likeness’ has become a synonym for a portrait. Similarly, in her introduction to Portraiture: Facing the Subject (1997), Joanna Woodall makes a claim for the centrality of naturalistic portraiture, and in particular the portrayed face, to Western art, defining naturalistic portraiture as ‘a physiognomic likeness which is seen to refer to the identity of the living or once living person depicted’.11 While Brilliant and Woodall do occasionally refer to examples of non-figurative or aniconic portraiture, this tends to be in order to reassert the predominance of the naturalistic portrait image.12 In the final pages of his text Brilliant envisages a dystopian future where the existence of portraiture ‘as a distinctive genre’ is threatened by ‘actuarial files, stored in some omniscient computer, ready to spew

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forth a different kind of personal profile, beginning with one’s Social Security number’.13 The implicit humanism of ‘proper’ portraiture is set against a dark Orwellian vision of the individual reduced to data; writing in 1991 Brilliant could not have foreseen the impact that the internet would have on the way in which we imagine human identity. In Portrayal and the Search for Identity (2014), Marcia Pointon asks directly (if somewhat rhetorically): Does a portrait have to look like somebody in order to be a portrait?14 Pointon argues that much of what we understand today to be the conventions of naturalistic portraiture originate from Rome in the classical period, where gestural language was adapted from rhetoric for statuary (and hence portraiture); these classical Roman conventions for portraiture largely persist to the present day. Appealing to the work of sociologists such as Erving Goffman, who have shown that communicating and expressing ourselves involve learned gestures that have common meanings within social groups, Pointon suggests that without this shared historical body language portraiture would cease to be meaningful as a social practice.15 Pointon’s argument is perhaps limited: whether gestural or verbal, language is never a static system but a dynamic one, constantly shifting and developing in response to social and cultural change; following this, the language of portraiture must also necessarily be mutable. It is this mutability that makes portraiture such a difficult genre to make generalizations about (Pointon herself allows that it is ‘an unstable, de-stabilizing and potentially subversive art’).16 Two examples of portraiture recently acquired by the National Portrait Gallery attest to the genre’s capacity for self-reinvention in response to contemporary concerns. Marc Quinn’s Sir John Edward Sulston (2001) (Figure  1.1) comprises a small stainless steel plate of bacteria colonies covered in agar jelly; these colonies contain parts of the sitter’s genome. (Sulston is a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who worked on the Human Genome Project and was a central figure in the development of DNA analysis.) Physiognomic likeness is rendered irrelevant as individual identity is instead configured through a biochemical dataset that is illegible to all but the expert eye. The second example, Grayson Perry’s Map of Days (2013; acquired 2015) (Figure 1.2), is an atypical selfportrait in the form of a map of a fortified city. The streets are marked for different, often conflicting aspects of Perry’s character; the implication is that the self is not a coherent knowable entity but multifaceted and ambiguous. If Quinn’s bio-portrait suggests an essential, biological model for contemporary identity, Perry’s Map of Days implies that identity is developed via a dialogic relationship between subject and society. Both, however, share with traditional portraiture the fact that they are snapshots of a given moment where the subject has been frozen in time.



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Figure 1.1  Marc Quinn, Sir John Edward Sulston (2001). Sample of sitter’s DNA in agar jelly mounted in stainless steel. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

Two further examples explore the temporal qualities of subjectivity and recall Brilliant’s anxious predictions about the displacement of the naturalistic portrait by its data-driven rival. Between 2010 and 2015 Susan Morris wore an Actiwatch, a small portable device that monitors the intensity of a body’s movements. The resulting data was processed by a chronobiology lab, where it was transformed into colour printouts: red for maximum activity, black for stillness and a gradual

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Figure  1.2  Grayson Perry, A Map of Days (2013). Etching from four plates, 111.5 × 151.5 cm/43⅞ × 59⅝ in. © Grayson Perry. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London/Venice.

spectrum in between. At the end of each year, the data was sent to a factory in Belgium, where it was woven into a tapestry, resulting in a graphic record of Morris’s activity and rest over the course of the year. As Margaret Iversen has observed, the device generated ‘an aniconic self-portrait restricted to bodily motion in time’.17 (Morris’s practice is explored further by Michael Newman in the opening chapter of this book.) Operating in a similar vein, Jason Salavon’s Spigot (Babbling Self-Portrait) (2010) is a two-screen installation based on records of the artist’s Google searches, which had been inadvertently archived from 2007 onwards. The data is organized in two ways: on one screen, by search terms and dates, offering a tantalizingly voyeuristic insight into the artist’s internet habits, the other outputting the same information as fluctuating squares of psychedelic colour.18 Both Morris and Salavon’s work forces a confrontation between the embodied individual and their data trace, as well as alluding to our contemporary culture of surveillance. While these examples are resolutely aniconic, other anti-portraits may retain an investment in figuration or physiognomic resemblance. In 2017, Maija Tammi’s portrait of an android named Erica was awarded third place in the



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Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize, a competition usually known for being relatively conservative in its delineation of the genre. What might a prizewinning picture of a robot (albeit a highly advanced one, allegedly able to express different emotions) suggest about the values of contemporary portraiture? In strictly visual terms, the work does little to challenge the precepts of its assumed genre. Taken in three-quarters profile, it depicts the head and shoulders of a pretty young woman dressed in a high-necked grey coat, her flawless skin, symmetrical features and expressionless pose suggesting the visual codes of an over-airbrushed commercial image or fashion editorial. Titled ONE OF THEM IS A HUMAN #1, the image (Figure 1.3) is part of a conceptual series of four portraits, three of androids and one of a plausible human; it is left up to the

Figure 1.3  Maija Tammi, One of Them Is a Human #1, Erica (2017). © Maija Tammi.

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viewer to identify which (if any) depicts a living being. The picture was entered into the Taylor Wessing competition in a deliberate infringement of the rules (which states that portraits must be of living people); both the photographer and the event organizers were keen to test the significance of the image for photographic portraiture as a genre. Aware only of the title of the work, the judging panel could not decide whether they were scrutinizing a picture of a human or a robot, citing this ambiguity as the key to the image’s potency. Drawing attention to the increasingly blurry boundary between man and machine, the picture implicitly challenges the long-standing humanistic associations of portraiture and mocks entrenched notions of the portrait as an expression of interiority or psychological depth. The debates engendered by Tammi’s image (and its institutional acceptance as a portrait) suggest the continuing evolution of portraiture as a cultural form; not only does the contemporary portrait not necessarily have to look like someone; in the twenty-first century, it appears, it may not even require a human subject.

Academic and curatorial histories Many histories of anti-portraiture trace the roots of the phenomena to the avantgarde art movements of the early twentieth century. For example, in his short essay ‘Residual Resemblance:  Three Notes of the Ends of Portraiture’ (1994), Benjamin Buchloh situates the ‘death of the portrait’  – and its subsequent resurrection  – in Pablo Picasso’s attempts to dismantle mimetic portraiture through his proto-cubist, mask-like rendering of Gertrude Stein in 1906 and his subsequent cubist depictions of his dealers Kahnweiler, Vollard and Uhde in 1910; these paintings have since become near-canonical examples of early anti-portraiture.19 Buchloh identifies the disappearance of the sitter from the surface of the canvas as one of the most radical developments of twentieth-century portraiture; while this might be understood as symptomatic of the modernist focus on the interior life of the subject (rather than its external appearance), Buchloh reads this as a response to a very different set of epistemic (rather than purely artistic) conditions; namely, the necessity of dismantling the outmoded concept of ‘a humanist bourgeois subjectivity’.20 He explores the historic tensions between photographic and avant-garde artistic approaches to portraiture, noting that at the very moment that painters like Picasso were discrediting traditional forms of visual representation of the subject (and hence implicitly challenging entrenched



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notions about human subjectivity), photography was able to guarantee the preservation of iconicity and restore confidence in the authority of essentialist and biological models of identity.21 This conflict reoccurs in the middle of the twentieth century in the disjuncture between conceptual approaches to portraiture (such as Robert Rauschenberg’s notorious ‘telegram’ portrait of Iris Clert in 1961) and pop artists’ deployment of the photographic portrait image, which has the paradoxical effect of articulating the absence (rather than the presence) of individual subjectivity. For Buchloh, these developments imply the processes of consumer capitalism through which the self-determining humanist subject of the past has been replaced by the subject as commodity object or as spectacle. Buchloh’s text is exemplary of the way in which debates about the ‘ends of portraiture’ or ‘the death of the portrait’ intensify in the final decade of the twentieth century, in both academic discourse and curatorial practice. There are a number of reasons why this should be the case. The 1990s were defined by a renewed focus on the politics of identity and representation, driven by events such as the AIDS crisis and threats to female reproductive autonomy via the antiabortion movement, as well as by the growth of academic and popular interest in new ideas about the formation of the subject articulated by French thinkers from the late 1960s onwards. Thanks to the popularity of writers such as Michel Foucault, the concept of the unified sovereign subject that had been entrenched since the Enlightenment was being replaced by a vision of the individual as partial, contingent, socially constructed and ever-changing, an individual tenuously constituted across time by a series of performative acts.22 Thus the subject became reimagined as a product of environment and circumstance, rather than a fixed and essentialized identity contained within an immutable inner self. Critiques of portraiture as either an insightful expression of psychical interiority or a guarantee of personal and social identity proliferated in the last two decades of the twentieth century, often articulated by artists practicing in the broad field of what Shearer West labels ‘postmodern portraiture’, making primarily figurative works that play with standard portrait conventions such as pose, expression or setting in order to undermine them.23 Canonical artists such as Cindy Sherman or Gillian Wearing, among others, became celebrated for works that resist notions of interiority or immobile identities, instead critically exploring the role of masquerade and performance in the construction of the subject.24 Starting with the Untitled Film Stills (1977–80), Sherman has photographed herself heavily disguised by clothes, cosmetics or prostheses to produce a vast assortment of different personas or types. While some claim

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that her works are not self-portraits at all,25 they are nonetheless frequently understood as exposing the structural instability of identity (and particularly of female gendered identity).26 Gillian Wearing similarly utilizes notions of masking and concealment; her work was memorably paired with that of French surrealist Claude Cahun for the exhibition Behind the Mask, Another Mask (National Portrait Gallery, London, 2016), where the show’s title overtly posited identity as a series of performative layers that can never be entirely thrown off.27 The exhibition for which Buchloh’s text had been commissioned, FaceOff:  The Portrait in Recent Art (Institute of Contemporary Art, Pennsylvania, 1994), was one of the earliest shows to directly address contemporary challenges to received notions of portraiture and was organized by the curator Melissa Feldman to suggest four broad modes of contestation (the first two of which reiterate Buchloh’s arguments as outlined above).28 One approach, exemplified by Andy Warhol’s celebrity screen-prints, is to transform the ‘unique’ individual into a consumable visual product that can be endlessly replicated. A  related strategy, implied by the work of Thomas Ruff, is to produce expressionless images that implicitly critique photography’s claim to express a subject’s inner essence (Buchloh reads Ruff ’s photographic portraits of individuals or family groups as reactionary attempts to resuscitate an obsolete image category).29 A third tactic is to challenge the honorific ambitions of portraiture by depicting a subject who is old, unwell or portrayed in an unflattering way: practitioners of this approach included photographers John Coplans, Jo Spence and Hannah Wilke and painter Alice Neel. The fourth stratagem identified by Feldman is the most radical and poses the greatest challenge to portraiture as traditionally understood: rejecting figuration entirely, portrait works based on sculptural installation, found objects or archival materials are found to be ‘replete with bodily evidence’; represented as an assemblage, the portrayed subject appears not so much a discreet individual as a symbol of a shared community.30 As an example, Feldman cites Russian-American conceptual artist Ilya Kabakov’s immersive environmental installation Ten Characters (1981–8), a fantastical reconstruction of a Sovietera shared apartment in which the tenants remain unnamed and unseen, their idiosyncratic personae instead suggested by the accretion of personal effects; the work is as much an imaginative portrait of communal life under Soviet rule as it is of any specific character.31 With the exception of this final category, which eschews the two-dimensional image altogether, Face-Off tended mainly towards works based in photographic practice, supporting Buchloh’s claim that photography has played a crucial role in critiquing and dismantling portraiture in the twentieth century and beyond.



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Ernst van Alphen’s text ‘The Portrait’s Dispersal’, published in Joanna Woodall’s edited collection Portraiture: Facing the Subject in 1997, builds on Buchloh’s essay to trace an emerging canon of anti-portraits, from Picasso’s cubist experiments (‘a new representational mode’ which articulates ‘a new concept of subjectivity’), through Warhol’s ‘superstar’ screen-prints (which leave the sitters ‘bereft of their interiority … exhibited as public substitutes for subjectivity’), and Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills (where, ‘instead of a transparent representation of a “full” subjectivity … we see a photograph of a subject which is constructed in the image of representation. The portrait, or rather, the standard view of the traditional portrait is turned inside out.’)32 The shift from icon to index is identified as a particularly significant development in contemporary portraiture; examining a series of installationbased works by Christian Boltanski, van Alphen declares the photograph a ‘dead pictorial genre’, suggesting that Boltanski’s indexical works fit much better into the category of portraiture than his photographic ones.33 Van Alphen reads these challenges to portraiture in two ways: first, as artistic responses to the breakdown in essentialist views of personal identity at the ends of the twentieth century; and second, in relation to what he identifies as the semiotic crisis of modernity (that is to say, the spilt between signified and signifier). Once the sign is no longer seen as a unified entity, the portrait can be used to challenge both entrenched notions about the human subjectivity and the authority of mimetic representation itself. About Face: Photography and the Death of the Portrait, which opened at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2004, aimed to address the fraught relationship between photography and the anti-portrait. An essay by the curator William E. Ewing situated early-twenty-first-century changes in photographic portraiture in the context of biomedical and digital advances and suggested that these developments echoed those that had taken place in body-centred photography a decade earlier.34 Just as the body had supplanted the academic nude in the photographic discourse of the 1990s, Ewing argued, at the beginning of the twentyfirst century the face could be seen to be displacing portraiture (as conventionally understood). The limitations of conventional portraiture, Ewing claimed, had caused photographers to reject the genre entirely:  ‘Some consider it to have exhausted its powers, endlessly recycling stereotypes and clichés; others see it as a genre fraught with discredited assumptions, both concerning the nature of the face itself, and the manner of its representation.’35 Reiterating an argument made by Feldman ten years earlier, Ewing drew attention to photographers’ criticisms of two assumptions that typically underpin photographic portraiture: first, that a portrait can offer a sufficient visual likeness of a person, and second, that a portrait can capture the inner being of the sitter.

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Since the turn of the millennium, several thought-provoking exhibitions of expanded portraiture have occurred in university-owned art galleries: examples include Striking Resemblance:  The Changing Art of Portraiture (Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, 2014) and This Is a Portrait If I Say So: Identity and American Art, 1912 to today (Bowdin College Museum of Art, in association with the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, 2016).36 Striking Resemblance takes the innovative step of addressing portraiture through the organizing concepts of the individual, the pair and the group; given that portraiture has typically privileged the notion of the individual, these latter two modes of approach are particularly productive in allowing a rethinking of the genre. While the double has a long history as a motif in portraiture (and particularly in family portraiture), in the late twentieth century it becomes a way of purposely disrupting the notion of the unified self; the double (and indeed the group) portrait forces a consideration of the self as a social, rather than singular, entity.37 Furthermore, as the curators note, contemporary portraiture is increasingly defined not by essential inner identity, nor by external resemblance, but by ‘the impersonal forces or extreme events that have been the most consequential for a person’s formation, or destruction’.38 This new understanding of portraiture as the articulation of a series of significant personal (or impersonal) conditions does not destroy the concept of the portrait but expands it to potentially include almost any image or object.39 Acting as a survey of challenges to the physiognomic portrait in American art in the twentieth century and beyond, This Is a Portrait If I Say So aims to delineate a set of possible histories for the aniconic portrait. The title refers to Robert Rauschenberg’s infamous conceptual portrait of his Paris-based dealer Iris Clert; on receiving an invitation to submit a contribution to an exhibition of portraits at Clert’s gallery, Rauschenberg dispatched a telegram, which read ‘This Is a Portrait of Iris Clert if I Say So’, thus drawing attention to the annunciative and performative gesture that underpins all acts of portraiture.40 Echoing earlier scholarship, the chapters in the accompanying catalogue focus on four significant historical periods for non-physiognomic portraiture: the second half of the nineteenth century, when the increasing popularity of photography reduced the need to preserve a person’s exact likeness through painting; the first decade of the twentieth century, exemplified by Picasso’s cubist portraits or by Gertrude Stein’s portrait poems (published in Alfred Stieglitz’s journal Camera Work in 1912); the 1960s, represented not only by conceptual portraits such as Rauschenberg’s Portrait of Iris Clert (1961) but also by figurative pop art works such as Andy



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Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych (1962); and the past twenty-five years (broadly, the 1990s to the present day). This final period is examined in depth in the catalogue essay by Anne Collins Goodyear, ‘On the Birth of the Subject and the Defacement of Portraiture’.41 Framing her investigation by referring to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s critique of the face as a signifying system, Goodyear details a series of changes in the conceptualization of personal identity, subjectivity and its representations in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Among these is a move away from the metaphor of ‘identity’ to that of ‘subjectivity’ as a technique for articulating personal experience; Goodyear helpfully outlines the intellectual shifts that underpin this, including the critique of the construction of the subject carried out in the second half of the twentieth century by French theorists such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault.42 Themes discussed in detail include the impact of critiques of photographic representation on portraiture as a genre; abstraction as a mode of self-representation (particularly not only in relation to issues of race but also as a tactic for investigating the self as a dynamic entity produced through intersubjective relations); and the increasingly relevant notion of the subject as a conceptual structure defined by the creation and consumption of data. This final issue of how to conceptualize the post-internet subject conveniently acts as a point of departure for the first chapter of this present volume.

This book This book expands on the scholarship outlined above, advancing the debate in new directions and examining fresh instantiations of expanded portraiture. It opens with an extended chapter by Michael Newman, who takes today’s digitized, data-based subject as a starting point for exploring the rich history of the anti-portrait and reflecting on its possible future. Subsequent chapters are arranged in broadly chronological order and have been grouped to draw attention to historical or thematic connections. Care has been taken to address works made in a range of media, including sculpture, assemblage and installation, painting, printmaking and photography; and from a range of cultural contexts, which include the United States, Britain, Europe and Latin America. It should be noted that each author’s definition of the anti-portrait is individual; this reflects the book’s intentionally open-ended and explorative approach and its commitment to a model of anti-portraiture that is fluid and receptive to future interpretations.

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Decapitations Michael Newman’s ambitious and imaginative chapter ‘Decapitations:  The portrait, the anti-portrait … and what comes after?’ plots a nexus of conceptual links between a wide range of instances of expanded portraiture. The titular metaphor of decapitation reinvigorates the overused cliché of the ‘death of the portrait’, allowing Newman to consider the relationship between a series of historical crises of sovereignty and the nation state, and corresponding transformations in portraiture. Identifying the French Revolution as a moment of decisive change for the concept of sovereignty, he reflects upon the characterization of the guillotine as a ‘portrait machine’ and the state of ‘headlessness’ as a potential condition of modernity. What occurs in the wake of the French Revolution, Newman suggests, is a splitting of the portrait and the head, necessitating a rethinking of the relationship between the portrait’s surface (image) and the subject’s depth (in both a physical and psychological sense); the resulting chiasmus between interiority and exteriority is identified as a crucial antecedent for the eventual evolution of the portrait into the anti-portrait. The overt rejection of a fundamentally Romantic concept of interiority is identified as the unifying characteristic of the conceptual portraits of the 1960s. In this period, the portrait breaks with iconicity and evolves in two directions:  towards the symbolic, in the language portrait, and towards the indexical, in portraits that originate from the trace left by the subject. Newman takes up the notion of the shadow as a particular type of index and uses this as a way of thinking about both portraiture ‘proper’ (as in the foundational myth of the Corinthian maid) and as a way of conceptualizing the anti-portrait in relation to this. As a ‘portrait’ that follows us around, the shadow is contingent upon our actions, directly countering the usual functional aim of the portrait, which is to preserve a resemblance beyond the moment of coming into being. Newman’s consideration of shadow extends to its linguistic equivalent, the ‘shifter’ (such as the pronouns ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘this’ and ‘that’, which depend on context for their meaning), as well as to the concept of the ‘data shadow’ cast by the contemporary subject in their everyday interactions with technologies such as the world wide web. Much as the anti-portrait of the 1960s was often an attempt at dealing with the commercial subject of mass publicity, today’s anti-portrait offers strategies for addressing issues such as data profiling and the corresponding collapse of the distinction between public and private, exteriority and interiority. Bio-power is currently giving way to data-power as visual surveillance is rapidly being replaced by code, with the subject producing themselves as an effect of the data



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that they use to monitor and manage their own existence. This is the context in which Newman reads a series of ‘data portraits’ by Susan Morris; these works constitute abstractions which exist in a double condition, balancing instrumental self-surveillance with an aesthetic surplus that is resistant to decoding. Casting Google and Facebook as ‘portrait painters at the service of capital’, Newman suggests that the present moment’s most dominant form of portraiture is less an artistic expression and more a generalized expression of power and fiscal value. In such circumstances, Newman argues, non-performance or refusal might be the most radical form of anti-portraiture open to us today.

Modernist experiments One genealogy of the anti-portrait places its origins in early twentieth-century attempts to break with existing methods of representation and find an original visual or verbal language capable of portraying the modern world as actually experienced. Portraiture played an important role in allowing avant-garde artists such as Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miró, Francis Picabia and Man Ray (to name just a small selection) to challenge the authority of the naturalistic or mimetic image and to experiment with innovative new modes of depicting a given individual.43 This section pairs chapters on the work of two exemplary modernist antiportraitists: the early twentieth-century-writer Gertrude Stein and the sculptor Alberto Giacometti. Ery Shin’s chapter ‘An anti-portraitist in the realm of letters’ examines the attempts of Stein to produce abstract portraits with words. Shin analyses the frequently drawn analogies between Stein and Picasso, both of whom used their chosen mediums to push against entrenched ways of seeing the world with the aim of arriving at modes of expression that would allow them to describe the world as actually experienced. Exploring the tensions between artistic representation and objective reality as expressed in Stein’s work, Shin alludes to a dialectic that is at the core of modernist innovations in portraiture. Véronique Wiesinger’s contribution, ‘Giacometti, existentialism and the “singular universal” ’, offers a careful rethinking of Giacometti’s sculpture in relation to the category of portraiture. Giacometti’s own attitude towards the reading of his work as portraiture was somewhat complex:  on the one hand, he resented the reduction of his work to a genre burdened with restrictive arthistorical connotations; on the other hand, he was acutely aware that his sitters, buyers and viewing public did generally experience his work as representations of named individuals. Reading Giacometti’s practice in dialogue with texts by

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writers that include Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Genet, Wiesinger demonstrates how Giacometti’s sculpture was interpreted by his contemporaries as expressing a fundamentally existentialist understanding of the human subject.

Distance and depersonalization The 1960s was a critical moment for anti-portraiture, marked by the expansion of the previously predominantly iconographic portrait into the realm of the symbolic, in the form of the linguistic portrait, and the indexical, in the form of portraits based on traces left by the subject’s body. In ‘ “Closeness, or the appearance of closeness”: Robert Morris’s critical self-portraits and the expanding artworld of 1960s America’ David Hodge focuses on a set of indexical self-portraits made by Robert Morris, consisting of handprints, footprints and other material traces; these works, Hodge suggests, first incite then frustrate the viewer’s desire for an authentic engagement with the artist. Hodge argues that in order for a work of portraiture to be viewed as an anti-portrait, it is not enough for it to simply attack existing aesthetic categories; instead, an antiportrait must critically examine, and then disrupt, the function of portraiture within a particular socio-historic moment. By situating Morris’s works within the art scene of 1960s America, and specifically the way in which an expanding viewership was encouraged to engage with the artwork through photographic images of the artist in their studio, Hodge is able to demonstrate that this is precisely what Morris’s portraits do. The tactic of deliberately distancing the viewer from the portrait subject is also addressed in Ella Mudie’s contribution ‘Subjects unknown: Found images and the depersonalization of portraiture’, which considers the incorporation of vernacular snapshots and vintage photographs into portraiture. Focussing on the work of Gerhard Richter, Tacita Dean and Luc Tuymans, Mudie suggests that use of found imagery can render a portrait’s subjects anonymous, unfamiliar and ultimately depersonalized; as a category of ‘anti-portrait’, such works are less about negating or deconstructing portraiture than about ‘haunting’ it. Such an approach, Mudie claims, can productively open up portraiture in relation to collective and historical memory, the phenomenology of loss and the workings of absence and desire.

Beyond the face Writing in Artforum in 1988, John Welchman noted that under the conditions of late twentieth-century modernity, the face ‘has been more or less effaced’.44



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The face has traditionally been the locus of portraiture:  accordingly, a refusal or negation of the face has been a recurrent tactic for artists seeking to subvert the genre’s associations with previous symbolic orders (‘imperial, religious, bourgeois’)45 or with the notions of personal presence or individual essence. The two chapters included in this section explore works where a refusal of the face also suggests a creative renegotiation of the repressive (as opposed to honorific) connotations of portraiture. In medical contexts in particular, the portrait has frequently demarcated ‘the terrain of the other’, exemplifying the pathologizing function of the gaze.46 Chapters by Julia Beaumont-Jones and Kristin Lindgren both address projects that seek to challenge these deep-seated associations, investigating the relationship between expanded portraiture and mental illness (Beaumont-Jones) and variant bodies (Lindgren). In ‘Subject/object:  Seeking the self in Susan Aldworth’s portraits of schizophrenia’ Julia Beaumont-Jones explores Susan Aldworth’s portraits of two artists with schizophrenia produced for the exhibition Reassembling the Self (Hatton Gallery, Newcastle, 2012). Excluding particularized representations of the subjects’ bodies in favour of found imagery and generic anatomical prints, Aldworth turns the notion of portraiture as an expression of inner or outer identity on its head and poses questions about the nature and location of schizophrenia and thus, by extension, of the self. Kristin Lindgren’s chapter ‘Hiding in plain sight: Gazing at Laura Swanson’s Anti-Self-Portraits’ considers a photographic series by artist Laura Swanson. In these pictures, the artist’s face is obscured and her body either hidden or only partially visible: simultaneously inviting the viewer’s gaze and resisting it, these images are compelling precisely because of what they withhold. Situating her study at the intersection of art history and disability studies, Lindgren argues that disability portraiture such as Swanson’s not only affects how we see variant bodies but also has implications for our understanding of portraiture as a genre.

After the image The use of non-mimetic physical objects as surrogate portraits is the focus of the first two chapters in this section. Addressing efforts in present-day Chile to memorialize the country’s disappearance through the use of ‘material portraits’, Megan Corbin’s text ‘Filling the narrative void: Material portraits in the Chilean post-dictatorship’ claims that the aftermath of the dictatorship offers a unique set of circumstances for the emergence of this new form of personal portrayal. At the centre of Corbin’s enquiry is the question of how identity can

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be represented when the subject has been rendered absent both physically and symbolically (their official existence frequently having been erased as part of the process of disappearance). Focussing on the question of what a portrait should do rather than what it looks like, Corbin argues that material portraiture can be a productive means of bearing witness to and working through the trauma of the past. The question of whether an aniconic object can be a portrait is also explored in Fiona Johnstone’s chapter, ‘Relics, remains and other objects: Non-mimetic portraiture in the age of AIDS’. Examining portraits produced in response to the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, and focussing specifically on the artistic deployment of human relics and remains as surrogate portraits, Johnstone argues that AIDS uniquely generated a situation where conventional mimetic portraiture was deemed inadequate. The indexical portrait, Johnstone suggests, allowed artists to allude to the absence of a subject who had passed away while simultaneously evoking their presence through the affective pull of their physical trace; intensely personal (as the index of a specific person) and yet also generic (in the sense that one person’s remains are generally visually indistinguishable from another’s), it could be used to articulate a tragedy that was both individual and collective; moreover, when understood in a corroborative capacity, the indexical portrait could be mobilized as empirical evidence of the medical, social and political crisis signified by AIDS. *** Collectively, these chapters present a powerful case for an expanded understanding of portraiture that exceeds the current definitions on offer in standard art-historical accounts.47 Literary scholars working in the field of genre studies have demonstrated that genres must be recognized as ‘inherently dynamic sites of contention between stability and challenge’.48 If, as Carolyn Miller proposes, we understand genres as ‘social actions’,49 it becomes clear that there are no neutral, fixed or objective criteria for classifying genres; instead they are necessarily culturally and historically contingent, with the capacity to ‘evolve, develop and decay’.50 To remain relevant, particularly in relation to emerging technologies and corresponding developments in epistemological concepts such as identity, subjectivity and representation, the portrait must be open to radical change; to continue to insist on physiognomic resemblance (for example) as an essential requirement of the portrait would be to ossify what should be a vital and evolving form. By addressing (anti-)portraiture in relation to a range of historically and culturally specific situations, from the modernists’



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interrogation of existing regimes of representation in the early twentieth century and conceptual artists’ innovative approaches to portraiture in the 1960s, to the (mimetic) portrait’s eventual defacement and disembodiment in the late twentieth century and beyond, the chapters contained in this volume make a convincing case for the genre’s continuing evolution.

Notes 1 Cf. John Hilliard’s description of anti-portraits as works ‘that largely refuse or subvert the conventions of the genre’; see John Hilliard, ‘The Picture Within’, Next Level, 2003, 52. A number of scholars have demonstrated that even these ‘received art historical conventions’ are more flexible than is often assumed, since ideas about likeness, identity and individuality are themselves subject to historical variation. For example, Maria H. Loh (‘Renaissance Faciality’, Oxford Art Journal, 32.3 (2009), 341–63) has argued that the application of present-day interpretations of ‘likeness’ and ‘naturalism’ to Renaissance portraiture is anachronistic, given that remembering and knowing what people looked like was a highly ambiguous concept in an era before the impact of photography on constructing facial identity. While likeness and resemblance did exist as concepts in the Renaissance, Loh explains, they were determined more by specific period codes and conventions than by what we would today recognize as an empirically ‘accurate’ mimetic likeness. Loh builds on the work of Harry Berger Jr. (‘Fictions of the Pose: Facing the Gaze of Early Modern Portraiture’, Representations, 46 (1994), 87–120), who has identified the fallacies of ‘mimetic idealism’ and ‘physiognomic interpretation’ as symptomatic of scholarship on Renaissance portraiture; such scholarship has, Loh and Berger argue, been dominated by a psycho-biographic tendency to attribute character to ‘realistic’ faces and an emphasis on the identification of sitters which presupposes that such images are truthful documents rather than artworks with their own sets of standards and purposes. Georges Didi-Huberman (‘Portrait, Individual, Singularity’, in The Image of the Individual: Portraits in the Renaissance, ed. Nicholas Mann and Luke Syson, trans. Carol Plazzotta (London: British Museum Press, 1998), pp. 165–85 (165)) has similarly suggested that a ‘passion for identifying’ means that art historians have tended to ask ‘Who is this a portrait of?’ rather than addressing the more important issue of ‘How is this a portrait?’ 2 Jacques Derrida, ‘The Law of Genre’, trans. Avital Ronell, Critical Enquiry, 7.1 (1980), 55–81 (56). 3 Carolyn R. Miller, ‘Genre as Social Action’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 70.2 (1984), 151–67.

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4 Paul Moorhouse, Howard Hodgkin: Absent Friends (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2017). 5 Moorhouse, Howard Hodgkin, p. 9. 6 Moorhouse, Howard Hodgkin, p. 9. 7 Rachel Cooke, ‘Howard Hodgkin: Absent Friends Review – Hello, Not Goodbye’, The Observer, 26 March 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/ mar/26/howard-hodgkin-absent-friends-review-national-portrait-gallery (accessed 21 September 2017). 8 Cooke, ‘Howard Hodgkin’. 9 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. J. Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd edn (London: Continuum, 2004), pp. 127–9; for an accessible explanation of ‘occasionality’, see Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (London: Reaktion Books, 1991), pp. 1–2. 10 Brilliant, Portraiture, p. 8. 11 Joanna Woodall, ‘Introduction: Facing the Subject’, in Portraiture: Facing the Subject, ed. Joanna Woodall (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 1–25 (1). 12 For example, Woodall accepts that ‘the early twentieth century rejection of figurative imagery challenged the belief that visual representation to a living or once-living model is necessary or appropriate to the resemblance of identity’, but in the next sentence points out that ‘naturalistic portraiture has never entirely disappeared from the progressive arena’; see Woodall, ‘Introduction: Facing the Subject’, p. 7. 13 Brilliant, Portraiture, p. 174. 14 Marcia Pointon, Portrayal and the Search for Identity (London: Reaktion Books, 2013). 15 Pointon, Portrayal and the Search for Identity, p. 13; Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (London: Penguin, 1959). 16 Pointon, Portrayal and the Search for Identity, p. 9. 17 Margaret Iversen, ‘Susan Morris: Marking Time’, in SUN DIAL: NIGHT WATCH, ed. Susan Morris (London, artists book, 2015). 18 Anne Collins Goodyear, ‘On the Birth of the Subject and the Defacement of Portraiture’, in This Is a Portrait If I Say So: Identity in American Art 1912 to Today, ed. Anne Collins Goodyear, Jonathan Frederick Walz and Kathleen Merrill Canpagnolo (New Haven: Bowdoin College Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2016), pp. 91–120. 19 For example, see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘Residual Resemblance: Three Notes on the Ends of Portraiture’, in Face-Off: The Portrait in Recent Art, ed. Melissa E. Feldman (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1994), pp. 53–69 (53–5); Brilliant, Portraiture, pp. 149–52; breaking with this,



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Dorinda Evans proposes the birth of photography as a key moment for the antior abstract portrait – see Dorinda Evans, ‘An American Prelude to the Abstract Portrait’, in This Is a Portrait If I Say So: Identity in American Art, 1912 to Today, ed. Anne Collins Goodyear, Jonathan Frederick Walz and Kathleen Merrill Canpagnolo (New Haven: Bowdoin College Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2016), pp. 11–35. 20 Buchloh, p. 55. Brilliant, Portraiture (p. 174) similarly adopts the term to describe Marcel Duchamp’s Wanted, $2000 Reward (1923), a work that plays on the conventions of the ‘wanted’ poster by placing two small passport-style photographs of the artist above a list of aliases and a physical description. 21 Buchloh, p. 56. 22 On the individual as constituted through a series of performative acts see Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (London: Routledge, 1993). 23 Shearer West, Portraiture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 210–13. 24 For a theoretical account of masquerade in relation to gender see Joan Riviere, ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’, in Psychoanalysis and Female Sexuality, ed. Henrik M Ruitenbeck (New Haven: College and University Press, 1966), pp. 209–20; see also Judith’s Butler’s analysis of Riviere in Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1990). 25 Cindy Sherman, ‘Cindy Sherman: Interviewed by Paul Taylor’, Flash Art, 1988, p. 78. 26 Shearer West, Portraiture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 207–8; Rosalind Krauss, Cindy Sherman 1975–1993 (New York: Rizzoli, 1993). 27 Sarah Howgate, Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the Mask, Another Mask (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2017). 28 Melissa E. Feldman, Face-Off: The Portrait in Recent Art (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1994). 29 Buchloh, p. 68. 30 Feldman, Face-Off, pp. 43 and 10. 31 Feldman, Face-Off, pp. 43–5. 32 Ernst van Alphen, ‘The Portrait’s Dispersal: Concepts of Representation and Subjectivity in Contemporary Portraiture’, in Portraiture: Facing the Subject, ed. Joanna Woodall (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 239–56 (242, 243 and 244). 33 van Alphen, ‘The Portrait’s Dispersal’, pp. 248 and 250. 34 William A. Ewing, About Face: Photography and the Death of the Portrait (London: Hayward Gallery, 2004). 35 Ewing, About Face, p. 6. 36 Donna Gustafson and Susan Sidlauskas, Striking Resemblance: The Changing Art of Portraiture (Munich: Prestel/Zimmerli Art Museum, 2014); Anne Collins

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Anti-Portraiture Goodyear, Jonathan Frederick Walz and Kathleen Merrill Canpagnolo, This Is a Portrait If I Say So: Identity in American Art, 1912 to Today (New Haven: Bowdoin College Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2016). Donna Gustafson, ‘Couples and Doubles: Reflections on the Double Portrait’, in Striking Resemblance: The Changing Art of Portraiture, ed. Donna Gustafson and Susan Sidlauskas (Munich: Prestel/Zimmerli Art Museum, 2014), p. 121. Lee Siegel, ‘On the Face of It’, in Striking Resemblance: The Changing Art of Portraiture, ed. Donna Gustafson and Susan Sidlauskas (Munich: Prestel/Zimmerli Art Museum, 2014), pp. 43–83 (78). The work of the artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres (explored in this volume in chapters by Michel Newman and Fiona Johnstone) is exemplary in this respect. For a detailed discussion of this work see Amanda Gluibizzi, ‘Portrait of the Artist(s) as a Portrait of Iris Clert’, Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry, 30.4 (2015), 455–63. The text to which Goodyear refers is Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ‘Year Zero: Faciality’, in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 2004), pp. 185–211; Goodyear’s use of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of faciality echoes an essay written almost forty years previously; John Welchman, ‘Face(t)s: Notes on Faciality’, November 1988, https://www. artforum.com/inprint/issue=198809&id=34670 (accessed 5 January 2018). Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), pp. 142–48; Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’, in The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 1991), pp. 101–20. On Duchamp and portraiture see Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture, ed. Anne Collins Goodyear and James W. McManus (Cambridge, MA: National Portrait Gallery, 2009); on Joan Miró, see David Lomas, ‘Inscribing Alterity: Transactions of Self and Other in Miro’s Self-Portraits’, in Portraiture: Facing the Subject, ed. Joanna Woodall (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 167–86; on Francis Picabia and Man Ray in the context of portraiture and American modernism, see Jonathan Frederick Walz, ‘Portraiture “at the Service of the Mind”: American Modernism, Representation, and Subjectivity from the Armory Show to the Great Depression’, in This Is a Portrait If I Say So: Identity in American Art, 1912 to Today (New Haven: Bowdoin College Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2015), pp. 37–59. John Welchman, ‘Face(t)s: Notes on Faciality’, November 1988, un-paginated https://www.artforum.com/inprint/issue=198809&id=34670 (accessed 5 January 2018).



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45 John Welchman, ‘Face(t)s: Notes on Faciality’, Artforum, 27.3, November 1988, p. ibid. https://www.artforum.com/inprint/issue=198809&id=34670 (accessed 5 January 2018). 46 Allan Sekula, ‘The Body and the Archive’, October, 39 (1986), 3–64 (6–7). 47 For example, Brilliant, Portraiture; Woodall, ‘Introduction: Facing the Subject’, pp. 1–25; Marcia Pointon, Portrayal and the Search for Identity (London: Reaktion Books, 2013). 48 Carol Berkenkotter and Thomas N. Huckin, ‘Genre from a Sociocognitive Perspective’, in Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication: Cognition/Culture/ Power, ed. Carol Berkenkotter and Thomas N. Huckin (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 1–26 (6). 49 Carolyn R. Miller, ‘Genre as Social Action’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 70.2 (1984), 151–67. 50 Aviva Freedman and Peter Medway, ‘Locating Genre Studies: Antecedents and Prospects’, in Genre and the New Rhetoric, ed. Aviva Freedman and Peter Medway, Critical Perspectives on Literature and Education (London: Taylor and Francis, 1994), pp. 2–19 (8).

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Decapitations: The portrait, the anti-portrait … and what comes after? Michael Newman

More portraits and self-portraits are being produced today than ever before. This is, of course, largely due to the digitalization of images, the global internet and social media.1 At the same time, artists are increasingly questioning the validity of the representational portrait based on visual resemblance, exploring other ways of producing portraits and attempting to resist or at least stall the smooth running of the use of corporate and surveillance profiling – effectively a form of automatic portrait-making based on big data. However, the history of what we will call the ‘anti-portrait’ can be traced at least as far back as the second and third decades of the twentieth century, to Dada protests against authority and to the Surrealist’s interest in automatism and the unconscious. The anti-portrait then re-emerges in the 1960s at a time of the circulation and commercialization of the celebrity icon and manifests itself both in portraiture based on the direct registration of the body and in portraits made purely of language. By the 1970s strategies of the anti-portrait were being used to challenge the dominant male, white and colonial gazes. The early twenty-first century has seen another wave of the anti-portrait, in the context of new forms of image and information dissemination, as well as emerging technologies of monitoring and tracking for the purposes of wresting financial value from every daily activity; transformations in the understanding and reconfiguration of life in relation to genetics; and the blurring of the boundaries between the human and animals, machines and other kinds of intelligence. These changes have coincided with a series of crises of sovereignty. Because the validity of the portrait has historically been linked with that of sovereignty – from monarchy at the time when the portrait was a vehicle for the representation of the privileged and their power, to the democratization of the portrait

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through photography following the popular redistribution of sovereignty and the emergence of new forms of control though the monitoring of the body  – experiments with forms of portraiture and anti-portraiture become ways of exploring the meaning and potential of these reconfigurations and, indeed, decapitations. The emergence of new approaches and strategies in relation to the portrait also provides the pretext for a retrospective rethinking of the history of the modern portrait. The portrait as it emerges in the fifteenth century and the icon that precedes it are supported by distinct ontologies. The icon connects through identification and participation and holds in its gaze the worshippers who have a liturgical relation with it. In relation to the portrait, the viewer looks at the subject, his or her viewpoint constructed as a vanishing point; and if it is a self-portrait, the painting becomes a ‘mirror of narcissus’. The worshipper might kiss or touch the icon in order that the grace that emanates from it might be communicated; with a portrait this would be considered the extreme behaviour of a lover, if not transgressive. The icon is conceived according to an ontology of analogy and participation organized in a vertical hierarchy, whereas the portrait exists in a neutral field of representation in which everything shares the same being, albeit in different modes.2 Rather than grades of being, the hierarchy implicit in portraiture will come from either the exemplarity of the life depicted or social status and class. Eventually photography will offer portraits for all. From the renaissance or early modern period, the portrait is understood to be a re-presentation of the subject:  at once a second presentation which implies an intensification of the first and at the same time an indication of a withdrawal from presentation.3 That withdrawal comes to be associated with the interiority of the subject, an idea that derives from Christian notions of grace and salvation. This is perfectly exemplified by the Flemish Petrus Christus’s painting Portrait of a Carthusian (1441) in which the monk in a silent order is shown in three-quarters profile, behind him a red box representing his cell – an interiority within an interior. The cells of a Carthusian monastery generally gave on to a little walled garden, in this case represented by the fly that has landed on the windowsill in front of the monk, with the frame of the window itself forming a trompe l’oeil frame for the painting. Instead of, as in the more typical perspective painting, looking at the world through the window equated with the painting, here we are looking inwards. The modern portrait emerges at a time when an expanding mercantile economy, with its interest in the value and visual experience of materiality, coincides with conflict between Catholic and Protestant, which places an emphasis on religious experience and the relation

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between outer ritual and inner resolve.4 In the Protestant mercantile context, the architectural metaphor of the religious cell is no longer needed, having been replaced by the interiority of the subject itself as the supposed locus of sovereign decision. It is during this time that nation states become consolidated as a political form distinct from feudal lordships and the imperium. With this development, portraiture of the monarch begins to adapt and evolve from the late medieval conception of ‘the king’s two bodies’, the mortal body which dies and the corporate body that continues and is passed on, in some cases via an effigy.5 A fundamental shift in this Christological concept of sovereignty is exemplified by the frontispiece by Abraham Bosse to Thomas Hobbes’s book Leviathan (1651). The monarch is depicted as unifying the people into a body politic and protecting them:  the corporate body of the monarch mimics if not replaces that of the church, and he derives his legitimacy from their sacrifice of their individual sovereignty for the sake of his protection, rather than directly from God. The people are represented simultaneously as constitutive of his body and as a multitude of individuals looking at him.6 The idea of sovereignty as embodied comes to be carried over into the portrait in general: the portrait of the subject becomes an image of the embodiment of individual sovereignty, an objectification which comes to be understood as figuring the autonomy and will of the subject.7 But just as in the earlier idea of sovereignty the king has two bodies, so the subject is a ‘doublet’, at once transcendental and empirical, subject and object.8 The modern portrait is the attempt to represent the sovereignty of the individual subject, which becomes a private sovereignty over the self. Since the subject is itself split into both subject and object, it exists in excess of the objectifying operation of visual representation. Representation then becomes the surface of a depth that withdraws or looks out through it, a mask that hides something. With a crisis in sovereignty comes a crisis in the portrait. The decisive modern change in the idea of sovereignty occurred with the French Revolution. If the nation, including its people, is identified with the king’s body, what happens when he is decapitated? What becomes of the body once the head is removed? Does the removal of the head relocate sovereignty not only in the people but also in the headless body? Could we consider ‘headlessness’ to be a general condition of modernity, as Georges Bataille suggests with the figure of the Acéphale?9 How would such a headless bodily sovereignty differ from a sovereignty of the head? What is the relation between the portrait produced by cutting at the neck and the production of a head as a mere object?10 The historian Daniel Arasse characterized the guillotine as a

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‘portrait machine’ analogous with the process of photography as described by Roland Barthes: the blade of the guillotine may be compared with the shutter of a camera – in the old, large format cameras which were used to make portraits the shutter which was raised and lowered was called a ‘guillotine’ – at the moment when the shutter catches the subject posed before the camera’s aperture.11 Both these instruments introduced an automatism into the production of portraits. Moreover, it was said that the portraits made by the guillotine were the only true ones, since the subject could no longer dissemble  – in death interiority and exteriority collapse into each other.12 But this was at the cost of reducing human heads to, as Hegel put it, nothing more than cabbages.13 According to her memoir Madame Tussaud searched the corpses of the guillotined to find heads from which to make casts, and eventually waxworks, to bring the dead back into phantasmagoric life. There is a moment when the interiority supposedly withdrawn from but also revealed in the surface of the portrait becomes inaccessible in a way that introduces an irreducible opacity. This happens precisely at the same time as phrenology is popularized: by claiming to read the inner nature of an individual though the shape of their head, phrenology suggests that understanding a person can no longer be taken for granted but requires the application of a ‘scientific’ technique. Through this procedure, the interiority that is pursued escapes by becoming merely another exteriority, ultimately comprising the nerves and synapses of the brain. Interiority become opaque coincides with an interest in images of the insane, such as those painted by Théodore Gericault between 1821 and 1823 for a doctor friend and which depicts the inner life of the subjects as inaccessible. A  little earlier Gericault had painted the heads of a man and a woman in bed, all the more shocking because it takes a moment to see that these heads have been decapitated and that any inner life is entirely the viewer’s projection.14 What has occurred in the wake of the French Revolution and the guillotine, and in the context of changing conceptions of the relation between subjectivity and reason, is the splitting apart of the portrait and the head, each of which entails a different conception of depth. If the depth of the portrait is the soul or inner life of its sitter, the inside of the head is muscle, blood, bone, nerve and brain, different kinds of matter with an organic life independent of the subject. A chiasmus occurs between portrait and head: the head becomes the depth of the portrait, or the portrait the surface of the head. With Cézanne’s portraits, notably Woman with a Cafetière (c.1895), the opacity of the subject becomes the norm as attention is drawn to the surface of the painting. A task for the artist now becomes to find a surface that is not a representation and a

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depth that is neither ‘soul’ nor objectified matter, as well as to transform the very relation of surface and depth. This divorce of exteriority and interiority, coupled with the sense, discussed by John Berger, that changes in subjectivity in modernity mean that the multiple identities of a person can no longer be captured by representation from a single point of view,15 opens up the portrait to the anti-portrait, where forms that both precede and follow the portrait seem to combine:  the shadow and analogue trace, the puppet, the robot. Early ‘anti-portraits’ might include Francis Picabia’s mechanomorphic portraits from 1915, which depict Alfred Stieglitz as a broken bellows camera or Gabrielle Buffet as a pair of flapping glass screens. Representing people as machines after the beginning of a mechanized war, these images refer to the notion of attributes in pictures of saints and martyrs, while depicting the subject as thoroughly reified. Another mode of early anti-portraiture is suggested by the desecration of the image that we find in Duchamp’s 1919 addition of a moustache and goatee to a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, which he inscribed with the letters L.H.O.O.Q. (in colloquial French, ‘she has a hot ass’). Around the same time, working in the context of Dada, Raoul Hausmann produced savage portraits using collage made from photographs, magazines and ephemeral paper material like tickets, including one of himself with the letters ‘ABCD’ pasted to his mouth.16 Both Duchamp and Hausmann (who described his own collages as automatist) anticipate the way in which the anti-portrait became associated with dream-like imagery and the unconscious, as well as with linguistic operations which disrupt the traditional use of the proper name to designate the subject of the portrait and tie the image authoritatively to its referent. A new type of anti-portraiture emerges in the 1960s, a period in which representation is simultaneously challenged and demanded, disrupted and exploited.17 At this point, the anti-portrait breaks decisively with the iconic character of portraiture hitherto and initially does so in two directions: towards the symbolic in the language portrait and towards the indexical in portraits that involve the traces of and direct connections with the body of the subject. These developments align with a rejection of the well-established association of subjectivity with interiority, a paradigm which had emerged in the eighteenth century and dominated Romantic and expressionist conceptions of the arts. This can be seen in Robert Morris’s Self-Portrait (EEG) of 1963, which according to Rosalind Krauss was the artist’s answer to the problem ‘of how to make a pictorial mark that would have no interior, no connection to virtual space, no expressive overtones’.18 Electrodes attached to Morris’s head recorded his brain’s activity, resulting in an electroencephalogram of wavering vertical lines; the process

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was sustained for a period long enough to produce a graph equivalent to the length of the artist’s body. While attached to the apparatus Morris ‘decided that he would “think about” himself ’;19 the ‘portrait’ thus parodies the idea of interior thought, which becomes a purely external record of brain activity. The work’s function as self-portrait is achieved not through iconographic representation but through the index in two senses: Morris’s brain-activity-traces and the length of the lines that mark the artist’s height. A similar approach can be observed in Brian O’Doherty’s Portrait of Marcel Duchamp (1966) (Figure 2.1), based on an electrocardiographic trace of the great conceptual artist’s heartbeat captured on paper by the younger, medically trained O’Doherty. Several years previously, in 1961, answering a request for a work to be included in an exhibition of portraits of the Paris gallery owner Iris Clert, Robert

Figure 2.1  Brian O’Doherty, Portrait of Marcel Duchamp: Mounted Cardiogram 4/4/66 (1966). Electrocardiographic tracings, ink and typewritten text on paper. Courtesy the artist.

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Rauschenberg sent a telegram reading: ‘THIS IS A PORTRAIT OF IRIS CLERT IF I SAY SO/ ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG.’20 The statement takes the form of a ‘performative’ which, according to the philosopher J.  L. Austin, changes a situation rather than, as in the case of the ‘constative’ statement, describing a state of affairs.21 Rauschenberg’s performative statement is a language act that changes the status of the telegram from a missive into a portrait. This transformation is authorized by the artist, the artist in this case being the authority who makes the performative effective. The work draws attention to the Romantic trope of the God-like status of the artist-creator, showing its structural basis in a selfauthorized performative, even as it mocks and undermines it, marking a shift in the role of the artist from maker to one dependent on language, who speaks with an authority that comes from elsewhere, but who claims the capacity to achieve a paradigm-shift. This cannot exclude the possibility that the performative fails and that the telegram is not a portrait – that it is not enough for the artist to say so – and this is also the point. The statement is archived on the basis of its material support, the telegram, which is by now an obsolete form of communication. Mel Bochner claimed that Rauschenberg’s Portrait of Iris Clert was on his mind when he made his Portrait of Eva Hesse (1966) (Figure  2.2)  – one of a number of word-portraits – comprising a tondo of graph paper, the word ‘wrap’ in the centre and synonyms circling around it.22 Bochner’s word-portraits start with a word that the artist considers suitable to represent the subject; Roget’s Thesaurus acts as a subsequent source for further words. The words become like objects as in concrete poetry and in this case change the orientation of the viewer to the support. It is also the case that the words are synonyms of the ‘origin’ word, which loses its originary status by being absorbed into the circle of synonyms. A  synonym is a likeness, as is, conventionally, a portrait. So, the relation of resemblance of the picture to the subject is replaced by the resemblance of the meaning of one word to that of another, which also, of course, draws attention to the degrees of difference of meaning between the words. The circle with ‘wrap’ at its centre  – possibly an allusion to an aspect of Hesse’s working process  – also suggests radiating degrees of likeness, but the sequence seems contingent. This reminds us of the arbitrary nature of the word as signifier, which not only contrasts with the iconic resemblance of mimetic representation but also reminds us that representation itself has a linguistic basis. Portraits need to be read, not least through their dependence on the proper name of the sitter: the proper name indicates a singularity of the subject of the portrait that withdraws from the chain of signifiers that circles around. Moreover, the portrait may be considered as a kind of wrapping of the subject, a concealment as much as a

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Figure 2.2  Mel Bochner, Portrait of Eva Hesse (1966). Pen and ink on graph paper. 4.375 inches diameter. Copyright Mel Bochner.

revealing. The refusal to locate identity and the sovereign will of the subject in a representational portrait has political implications: words take up the empty space left by the absence of a pictorial image, as if that were the condition for a discourse between subjects to take place. The word-portrait asks to be discussed rather than gazed upon and admired. The word-portrait is exploited to different ends in the Japanese artist Kazz Sasaguchi’s Constellation (2002) series, in which the brand names of cosmetic products are inscribed in gold leaf print on sheets of watercolour. In one such ‘portrait’ (Figure 2.3), where the hair would usually be we find ‘MOD’S HAIR Conditioner’ above ‘MOD’S HAIR Shampoo’, below which is ‘MANDOM Lucido-L Hair Wax’, and on the forehead ‘Hand Made Lavender Water’. Various creams and powders are repeated symmetrically for the two sides of the face, until we reach a mouth composed of ‘OMI BROTHERHOOD Menturm Medicated Lipstick’, and ‘KOSE Luminous Lipstick, OR280’. The face is abstracted through the commercial products used on it, products which represent  – in the sense

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Figure  2.3  Kazz Sasaguchi, detail from Constellation (2002). Gold leaf print on watercolour paper; 14 pieces, 45 × 35 cm each. Courtesy the artist.

of standing in for – the subject who becomes an adjunct to the abstraction of the commodity, to which the very materiality of language becomes subordinate. Like one of Guillaume Apollinaire’s calligrammes, in which the features of the face become language, here language becomes material in a spatial arrangement reminiscent of Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem Un Coup de dés, which itself ends

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with a constellation. But in Sasaguchi’s Constellation, the face is transfigured into a configuration of brands, the names of which shine forth in gold. From Duchamp’s feminine alter ego Rrose Sélavy, photographed by Man Ray and placed on a bottle of scent in 1921, via Andy Warhol’s portraits and David Bowie’s constructed personae, to Cindy Sherman’s self-transformation into generic female types, certain practices of self-representation repetitively re-cite already existing images to suggest that the self is the result of a continuing performance, rather than an underlying essence.23 The iconic performative portrait has come to channel the social imaginary of its time, generating new ways of thinking about the identity of the subject as multiple and gender-fluid. But these possibilities exist in a state of ambivalence or contradiction, because the identities that result from this malleability, which appear to be produced at the will of the subject, become the objects of exploitation by the new media industries and later corporations syphoning value from social networks, exploiting a desire for self-invention that is in fact driven by conditions outside the subject. It could be said that this is precisely what the indexical and linguistic types of anti-portrait try to resist or evade, but without reinstating the idea of the autonomous individual.

Shadows and shifters In the photograph Que me veux tu? (1928), a pale Claude Cahun doubles her shaved head so that one appears to whisper into the ear of the other, in a way that seems a further doubling of an already ambiguous gender identity. The double often appears in literature – in Dostoyevsky and Poe for ­example – as an agent of death or destruction. In The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890–1), a portrait of the eponymous character takes on his corruption in its appearance while Gray remains beautiful, until he is found murdered in front of the painting, a disfigured corpse, the painting returned to its former beauty.24 If the portrait can be conceived as a double of the subject, so might the shadow: it is therefore not surprising to find the shadow placed at the origin of portraiture in Pliny’s story of the daughter of the potter Butades. The girl traced the shadow of her departing lover upon a wall, from which her father made a relief portrait following, and thereby obliterating, the outline; once hardened in an oven, the portrait was finally placed in a temple.25 The portrait relief as a re-presentation of the subject exchanges the shadow for its concrete delineation, transformed into an index of absence and loss, if not death.

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The shadow is an event that is dependent upon, and reflective of, the conditions that are simultaneous with it. This directly counters the functional aim of the portrait which was to preserve for future posterity a resemblance beyond the moment of its coming into being, a conception connected both with classical ideas of fame and Christian notions of immortality. It should be noted however that, as Maurice Blanchot points out, it is the portrait that produces the resemblance and not the other way around:  A portrait – one came to perceive this little by little – does not resemble because it makes itself similar to a face; rather, the resemblance only begins and only exists with the portrait and in it alone … expressing the fact that the face is not there, that it is absent, that it appears only from the absence that is precisely the resemblance.26

For Blanchot, the portrait is a version of the cadaver when the person becomes their own resemblance.27 As the photograph is to the shadow, so inscription is to what the linguistic theorist Roman Jacobsen called the ‘shifter’, such as the pronouns ‘I’ and ‘you’, ‘this’ and ‘that’, which depend on their context of utterance to be filled with the meaning.28 In 2010 Mark Wallinger made a ‘column’ in black fibreglass with spreading capital and base on a white plinth (the relation to Capital in the senses of letter, economy and for that matter head are at all play here), rendering in three dimensions the ‘I’ from the Times New Roman font, and titling it Self (Times New Roman) (Figure 2.4).29 This may be compared with Robert Morris’s I-Box (1962), where a hinged wooden ‘I’ in the facade of a plywood cabinet painted in sculpt metal (a probable reference to Jasper Johns) opens like a door to reveal a named photograph of the artist, his head reaching to the top and feet to the bottom of the aperture: the general ‘I’ is here filled by a specific, sexed body with the penis at the midpoint, giving this appropriation of the first person singular pronoun a phallic inflection.30 Unlike Morris, Wallinger does not seek to occupy the ‘I’ himself. What he does with Self (Times New Roman) involves an operation of rotation into three dimensions of the print letter ‘I’, which connects this work to Renato Bertelli’s Continuous Profile (Head of Mussolini) (1933) (included by Wallinger in his curated exhibition The Russian Linesman),31 as well as to many other works in Wallinger’s oeuvre that involve rotation. Times New Roman was the default font on Microsoft Word and came to be associated with business correspondence and legal authority; by using it as a title for the column on a plinth, Wallinger makes the work allude to the authoritarian and erect statue of a Roman emperor,

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Figure 2.4  Mark Wallinger, Self (Times New Roman) (2010). Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

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implying a comparison between the image emanating political power and the multitude of selves who can occupy the ‘I’. While this may seem like a contrast, it is also the case that the modern abstract subject has one of its genealogical sources in the Roman concept of citizenship. However the withdrawal of the statue from old Roman times in Wallinger’s Self (Times New Roman)  – the connection with the Head of Mussolini indicates precisely the disruption of the fascist dictator put into a spin – indicates the post-imperial, post-sovereign dimension of the democratic politics that it implies, where political will should no longer be located in any kind of body, whether the body of the monarch, or the leader, or for that matter a corporate body. If sovereignty is now unrepresentable by the portrait, is it representable at all? Just as the photograph is an ‘iconization’ of the index, so Self (Times New Roman) is an iconization of the shifter, but a paradoxical one, since the iconized shifter is an emptiness, which does not function until the event of its occupation in an enunciation. Since anyone can say ‘I’, Self (Times New Roman) is an icon of everyone. What seems to be the most ego-centric of gestures – as in the vast, apparently megalomaniac installation of Self (Times New Roman) on the facade of the Baltic, Gateshead in 2012  – paradoxically produces, in principle at least, the most democratic of works. A  (non)-colour of absence, the black of the ‘I’ could well signify that the place of power, instead of being filled by a body, is empty as, according to the political philosopher Claude Lefort, a condition for democracy.32 Its print-blackness also draws attention to the whiteness of the majority of those in positions of power in the global North and West, and therefore the way that art incorporates and conceals social injustice. However, Self (Times New Roman) is different from a written ‘I’ in that the latter always tends towards the symbolic, towards its integration in the language system of differential signifiers, whereas Wallinger’s ‘I’ is free-standing, like an orphaned column which supports nothing. This also makes us wonder why in written English the subject refers to him or herself by a letter that is a vertical stroke or column. The psychoanalytic dimension of the self ’s ability to say ‘I’ is extended by Wallinger to other works which also constitute self-portraits. In the painting series Self Portrait (Freehand) (2013–), which follows a series using different fonts, the ‘I’ is smearing into a blot; in the Id Painting series (2015–) Wallinger presses himself to the canvas to create paintings with both hands so that in effect he is painting almost blind, inverting the canvas to continue part of the way through, forming large practically symmetrical shapes reminiscent of the Rorschach test blots. While produced most intimately by a free process of Wallinger’s own body and psyche, the paintings actually become meeting points

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between the single artist’s production and the multiple viewers’ projections, each of which will be unique. In the exhibition ‘ID’ at Hauser and Wirth, London, in 2016, these paintings were accompanied by an ‘epigraph’ work Ego (2016) comprising digital prints of the artist’s hands with index fingers almost touching, like those of Michelangelo’s God and Adam; and Superego (2016), a rotating glass mirror atop a steel pole based on the revolving New Scotland Yard sign, an image of universal self-surveillance. Together these works consider different ways in which the self is produced. The black (non)-colouring of Self (Times New Roman) gives the appearance of a shadow:  either the subject has become a shadow of itself or the shadow has become orphaned from the self who casts it, raising itself off the ground and taking on a free-standing status, like a portrait double.33 Wallinger’s video Shadow Walker (2011) follows the shadow of the sandal-shod artist as he walks along Shaftesbury Avenue in London: the effect of this secular Calvary is that of a contact icon (like the Turin shroud) breaking away from its originating subject and becoming independent, a trace taking on a life of its own, a shifting self-portrait that becomes strangely excessive and independent in relation to its source. Via the shadow-as-index this portrait draws on its pre-modern iconic status, but is emptied of participatory power and recontextualized as part of the ocular ceremony of art rather than the sacrament of religion. Through this gesture Wallinger also reveals the return into (anti)-portraiture of the theological ontology of analogy: he is not the first to do so. Joseph Cornell combined iconographic representation (images taken from art and mass culture) with a method of analogy which he found in French Romantic and Symbolist poetry, applying these methods to the objects, images, clippings and documents that he gathered from his visits to thrift shops, dime stores, libraries and publishers during his wanderings in New York City. That he conceived of this as portraiture is clear from the title of the exhibition held in the Hugo Gallery in New  York in 1946, ‘Romantic Museum (Portraits of Women):  constructions and arrangements’, where Cornell displayed both the boxes compiled from his discoveries and the dossiers where his sources of knowledge and inspiration were ordered and archived. One of the most striking of the boxes, Untitled (Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall) (1945–6), was exhibited with the dossier dedicated to it (which is unusual since other dossiers mostly relate to series, sources for material or themes). It could be argued that since it was exhibited, the dossier itself is also a work: dossier and box together form a portrait of the movie star Lauren Bacall, a strange anticipation of the way in which today the internet links together the profile with consumer

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desire. Cornell’s practice indicates the necessity of what might seem extrinsic, the parergon or supplementary work of the container and the archive in the constitution of a portrait: from frame to file, vitrine, open-sided box, casket and coffin. The prototype for this is of course Duchamp’s The Green Box (1934) of notes for The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (Large Glass) (1915–23), and the collection of his miniaturized works in the salesman’s suitcase, the Boîteen-valise (1935–41).34 The Bacall box has a symmetrical construction as if to give order to disruptive desire: in the centre, peering through a window, is a three-quarter profile image of Bacall’s face taken from a publicity still for the film To Have and Have Not (1944); small childhood photographs of the actress and her pet cocker spaniel are displayed on both sides; to the top is a rectangle with city scenes of skyscrapers and to the bottom a wooden ball placed in front of a mirror. This mirror would reflect the viewer, who would thereby appear in the box, although separated from Bacall, who is made even more remote by her positioning behind blue glass in three smaller frames placed below the central one. The overall mise en scène, with its play of nearness and remoteness, and not unlike that of Duchamp’s Large Glass, is one of solipsistic desire and frustration, suggesting a publicity machine generating aura and a cult image; this might be seen as a gesture towards the private appropriation of publicity. The analogical dimension is even more emphatic in boxes where there is no visual representation of the subject, such as the earlier Homage to the Romantic Ballet (1942), a velvet-lined casket containing seven cubes of artificial ice and an inscription on the inside of the lid describing how the ballerina Marie Taglioni danced for a highwayman ‘upon a panther’s skin spread over the / snow beneath the stars’. The predominant tonality of both boxes is dark blue, as if they contain the infinity of the night sky. The use of objects experienced in terms of analogy allows the combination of nearness and distance, presence and absence, whether or not the human subject of the ‘portrait’ is represented. A similar analogic approach to portraiture develops in the 1980s, particularly in response to the impact of AIDS.35 In Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers) (1987–90), which is usually read as a double portrait of Gonzalez-Torres and his partner Ross Laycock, two just-touching wall-mounted clocks become synchronized, but eventually cease to keep time together: shared time becomes also a time of separation and an anticipation of death; however, the clocks may be perpetually reset, and therefore the work is infinite. If one of the clocks stops or ceases to work, it can be fixed or replaced. The tactic of doubling is repeated in a number of works, including “Untitled” (Double Portrait) (1991) which

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consists of stacked sheets of paper printed with two barely touching gold circles, with visitors able to take away the sheets; and the billboard poster “Untitled” (1991), which comprises a large-scale photograph of an unmade double bed with two slept-on pillows. (1991 was the year in which Ross died of an AIDSrelated illness). In the individual portrait, “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (1991), candies wrapped in multicoloured cellophane are substituted for Ross’s absent body:  at the beginning of the installation one-hundred-and-seventyfive pounds of candies corresponding to Ross’s ideal body weight  – ‘If I  do a portrait of someone, I use their weight’ Gonzalez-Torres has said36 – are piled in the corner of the gallery, with the exact configuration varying depending on the installation. Visitors may remove sweets from the pile – although they are not specifically invited to do so, leaving the decision up to them – and the installation’s mass will thus diminish as Ross’s ‘body’ became subject to the effects of AIDS-related wasting. The pile may be returned to its starting weight when the confectionary is replenished by the curators or owners (a process that, in effect, will by implication continue endlessly as the work is remade) or else for a particular installation at the discretion of the collector or curator the candies may be completely removed without being replenished. The ‘ideal weight’ may also be interpreted in other ways, such as the approximate weight of a healthy person, thus generalizing the work from the focus on one individual – the same ‘ideal weight’ was used in “Untitled” (Portrait of Dad) (1991)  – while at the same time raising questions about this normative ‘ideal’ in relation to a white, Western, Classical ideal of sculptural representation, with its implicit racism, which Gonzalez-Torres’s anti-portraits contest. All three of these ‘portrait’ works draw on analogy, with the final one taking a form that alludes to the sacrament of the mass, returning behind the representational portrait to ‘pre-portraits’ such as icons and relics. Gonzalez-Torres also goes in the opposite direction, as he puts it in a letter dated 3 December 1994 to a subject whose portrait he had made the previous year, Untitled (Portrait of Robert Vifian), from ‘the denoted’ to ‘the connoted that I consider to be the most intriguing, and exciting’.37 The connoted will include ‘social / cultural / gender / economic background that can be “read” into the picture’. What Gonzalez-Torres does is take this aspect and render it precisely as writing to be read, inscribed in print high along the wall under the ceiling as in “Untitled” (Portrait of the Wongs) (1991) or when outside beneath the roof as in “Untitled” (Portrait of the Stillpasses) of the same year, where one might find a frieze on a temple or memorial (a way of presenting through words and names that recalls Lothar Baumgarten’s way of honouring tribal peoples by their names without appropriating or fetishizing their culture). However, the

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word-strips are also reminiscent of ticker tape, setting up a tension between time passing and fixity. Needing to encompass as well how his subjects change beyond the moment of authorship of the ‘portrait’, Gonzalez-Torrez envisaged that ‘these pieces can and should be altered’. They include dated historical events, personal occasions and associations, playing between the intimate and the public, the particular and the universal. Where the portraits are of couples the associations will be shared, but other viewers might also find something in common. Instead of the approach of ‘reading’ or decoding the portrait-image, it is up to the viewer to visualize the image of the person that might go with the words and dates. Gonzalez-Torres seems to be suggesting that it is not through representation but only through language that we can get beyond ‘how we look’ to ‘what we are’: in effect, the anti-portrait is the only true portrait.

Confrontations and substitutions The use of analogy and resemblance to avoid the visual fetishization involved in objectifying representation has been employed in self-portraiture by women artists, artists of colour and artists critical of colonization.38 While representation is ‘univocal’ (as a mode which applies equally to its objects regardless of their intrinsic differences), analogy involves a play of likeness and difference, so that something unlike that to which it is referred (in representational terms) may be like it in other ways. This was apparent in Deirdre O’Dwyer’s exhibition Stranger in 2009 at Julius Caesar, Chicago, which involved both a truncated representation and analogies between different modes of art. The exhibition comprised the following components: some nine abstract paintings arranged slightly higgledypiggledy along a wall and round a corner, some just-touching (suggesting a personal arrangement that doesn’t quite conform to the rules of exhibition), and one of which had some red hairs caught in the paint; a photograph of a woman with long red plaits, cut off by the edge at the eyes; and a pile of self-burned CDs of Willie Nelson’s album Red Headed Stranger (1975) in jewel cases, the white jacket of each marked with a red X, suggesting the ‘nothingness’ of the subject as the basis for its identifications and materializations. It is as if the curtailment of the representational photograph at the eyes invites us to read the other objects (including the abstract paintings) analogically in relation to what is not seen or known, so that taken together in its disparities the whole exhibition becomes a composite and analogical self-portrait where the distinction between the real and the fictional breaks down in the combination of distinct materialities with

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acts of self-negation, impersonation and disguise in a process of self-revelation and withdrawal. The title of Cornelia Parker’s Self-Portrait as a Triangle, a Line, a Circle and a Square (2015) recalls Cézanne’s dictum ‘Treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone, the whole put into perspective so that each side of an object, or of a plane, leads towards a central point.’39 By painting the geometric shapes in blood, Parker’s self-portrait raises the question of whether geometry, rather than drawing out the essence, acts as a masculine defence against the feminine. The title draws us to infer, rightly or wrongly, that the blood comes from the artist’s own body. It may be menstrual, the product of the woman’s body and associated with taboo; geometry becomes a means of controlling dirty ‘matter out of place’.40 In the contrast between the indexicality, materiality and abjection of the blood, and the ‘ideal’ status of the geometric shapes, what is avoided altogether is representational resemblance, the classic mode of portraiture. Classic, representational portraiture is often rendered problematic by the position of the gaze  – historically white, male, colonial  – that determines it. Important strategies of anti-portraiture have been developed to confront this. In Lorna Simpson’s Twenty Questions (A Sampler) (1986) the black female subject wearing a white shift turns her back, so that rather than the visage we are faced with somewhat straightened hair, in circular gelatin silver prints, suggesting mirrors. Underneath are text panels which phrases evoking epithets directed at women: ‘IS SHE AS PRETTY AS A PICTURE’ ‘OR CLEAR AS A CRYSTAL’ ‘OR PURE AS A  LILY’ ‘OR BLACK AS COAL’ ‘OR SHARP AS A  RAZOR’. These show how marked attitudes concerning black women are affected by assumptions associating whiteness and beauty. These ‘mirrors’ reflect back on the viewer their own attitudes, as well as forcing a positional distinction between black and white viewers, and men and women. This is stark in a picture by Carrie Mae Weems, “Mirror, Mirror” (1987), which shows a black woman holding a framed mirror in which appears a white-faced woman in tulle holding a silver star, and underneath is the text ‘LOOKING INTO THE MIRROR, THE BLACK WOMAN ASKED, “MIRROR MIRROR ON THE WALL, WHO’SE THE FAIREST OF THEM ALL?” THE MIRROR SAYS, “SNOW WHITE YOU BLACK BITCH, AND DON’T YOU FORGET IT!!!” ’41 If Twenty Questions reflects the gaze of the viewer, “Mirror, Mirror” shows how the white gaze is insidiously incorporated into that of the black woman at herself. However, for the subject of the portrait to turn away is also to create a space sheltered from the dominating gaze.

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Further than an inversion of depth, it is necessary to question the model of a subjectivity that moves from interiority to exteriority in relation to the political question of the ways in which the subject is positioned by projections from outside, which may be racist or sexist. Rasheed Araeen’s slide projection work Paki Bastard (Portrait of the Artist as a Black Person) (1977) shows the artist blindfolded and gagged with one of his abstract Structures projected over him, as a response to the way in which his access to acceptance in the modernist avantgarde was blocked by then new cultural position of ‘multiculturalism’ which demanded that artists should express their ‘ethnic’ identity. Identity may involve solidarity rather than fusion. Donald Rodney’s responses to outright racism towards black men in Britain was to paint Self-Portrait as Clinton McCurbin (1988), depicting as his self-portrait an image of a man who had died during an attempted arrest by police in a Wolverhampton shopping centre in 1987, identifying himself with a victim of police violence. Of another work comprising images of black men on lightboxes arranged in a T-shape on the wall, titled SelfPortrait: Black Men Public Enemy (1990) (Figure 2.5), Donald Rodney said: I’ve been working for some time on a series…about the black male image, both in the media and black self-perception. I wanted to make a self-portrait. [Though] I  didn’t want to produce a picture with an image of myself in it. It would be far too heroic considering the subject matter. I wanted generic black men, a group of faces that represented in a stereotypical way black man as ‘the other’, black man as the enemy within the body politic. The pictures came from The Sunday Times and a book on blood diseases and the final black and white picture is an identikit picture from The Evening Standard.42

This approach draws on Duchamp’s Compensation Portrait of 1942; rather than use his own image to represent himself in the catalogue for the First Papers of Surrealism exhibition, Duchamp substituted a photograph of a povertystricken white woman taken by Ben Shahn while working for the Farm Security Administration in 1935. All the artists in the show were similarly represented in the catalogue by portraits from the history of modern photography. In this way, as Sarah E.  James puts it, ‘Duchamp annihilated the link between the subject represented by a portrait and the subject it depicted.’43 However this move could also be regarded as a cynical appropriation of the impoverished, which is precisely the contrary of Rodney’s approach to solidarity. What of absent subjects for portraiture whose images do not exist and whose stories have barely been told if at all? Canadian-based artist Joscelyn Gardner has created several series of ‘portraits’ from the position of her white Creole heritage

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Figure  2.5  Donald Rodney, Self-Portrait:  Black Men Public Enemy (1990). Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London © The Estate of Donald G. Rodney.

from Barbados in relation to the experience of enslaved women on Caribbean plantations in the eighteenth century. Given that images of the particular women concerned do not exist, and their stories are mostly derived from the white plantation managers, and thus under a racist colonial gaze, mimetic representation of the subjects is excluded. These women have to be represented

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in other ways that would speak to their experience without substituting for it. Each of the lithographs which comprise her Creole Portraits III (2009–11) (Figure 2.6) includes three elements: an illustration of an elaborate contemporary hairstyle associated with women of African heritage, a representation of the instruments of constraint, oppression and punishment, and beneath that a plant illustration. While botany was at the time a popular object of enlightenment scientific knowledge, the plants in Gardner’s lithographs refer to the knowledge not of the scientists but of the women themselves: they are plants used to induce abortions by women who had been made pregnant, usually by rape, in part to increase the slave population. A slave woman who aborted would be severely punished, including by being forced to wear one of the iron collars depicted. If the traditional portrait is an honorific genre based on the representation of the face associated with the proper name, Gardner’s Creole Portraits honour the anonymous women, pay tribute to their knowledge and draw attention to the oppressive conditions of colonial slavery, while at the same time avoiding representing the women through the forms of knowledge implicated in the power structures of the colonial project.44 Benjamin Buchloh argues that to make a traditional portrait now would be to belie the collapse of subjective identity and autonomy into objects as commodities in capitalist consumer society.45 But what if those objects that represent the subject to herself are gifts given by others? Commodity fetishes become displaced into another economy, or even an aneconomy of the gift.46 Roni Horn describes the archive of photographs she has made of objects given to her since 1974 as ‘a vicarious self-portrait’. This has appeared in various forms: as the installation of framed photographs, The Selected Gifts (1974–2015); as a book of these photographs, Roni Horn: The Selected Gifts (1974–2015); and as a chap book, My Gifts, A Selection (1960–2015). She continues, ‘It is a reflection through the warped optic of others that shows a level of accuracy beyond that of any mirror. A portrait that I could not have imagined without the unwitting aid of friends, acquaintances, and knowing strangers.’47 The objects reflect how the givers see the artist, so together make up a heterogenous portrait by proxy.

Resemblance and replication The critique of and departure from mimetic portrayal has also affected the return to more traditional modes of portraiture in ways which incorporate their own displacement and problematization. Thomas Struth’s family portraits, such as The

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Figure 2.6  Joscelyn Gardner, Coffee arabica (Clarissa) (2011) from the series Creole Portraits III (2009–11). Hand-coloured stone lithograph on frosted mylar, 36 × 24 in. Photo credit: John Tamblyn. Courtesy the artist.

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Smith Family (1989), by basing the search for resemblances on the idea of family, imply that likenesses, as well as disparities, have a genetic basis. This poses the question of what the relation might be between the portrait photograph as the production of a resemblance and the biological production of children combining traits of both parents. What is the difference between making a photograph and making a child? Can the child be regarded as a hybrid ‘portrait’ of the parents? Many would find the eugenic associations of this idea deeply uncomfortable. Nonetheless, we are on the cusp of a moment where through the growth of interest in genetics, processes of replication might come to displace mimetic representation as a model for image production, offering new possibilities for portraiture and rendering the portrait more like a wayward ‘child’ of the subject rather than a faithful copy of its visual appearance. In Polish artist Zuzanna Janin’s Coffin Portraits. Follow Me, Change Me, It’s Time (1995–7) photographic images of eight women from four generations of the artist’s family (ranging from 1 year old to more than 90 years old, with the artist in the middle) are printed on sheets of transparent laminate which are layered one on top of the other and nailed to the wall in four groups, suggesting a series of identification shots: rightfacing profile, front-facing profile, head from behind and left-facing profile. The ordering of these images by depth (as opposed to along a horizontal or vertical axis) breaks with the normative linear temporality produced by the conventional spatial hanging of portraits, complicating the surface ‘presence’ of the portrait with a temporality-in-depth that invokes incompleteness, lacunae and forgetting. In three of the four groups, the images are layered so that the oldest person is on top; their hexagonal shape refers to the sixteenth-century Polish tradition of portrait painting on coffins, confirming the relation of the portrait to death. In the fourth group, the order of layering is reversed, so that the child is on top. The shape of this group is rectangular; the left-facing profile suggests a gaze directed towards the future, perhaps anticipating the subject who will look back to remember, while the older woman looks forward in time to the viewer. One aspect of portraiture which has contemporary ramifications for the anti-portrait and beyond is the extension of the ‘bio-portrait’ into the domain of replication. In social practices of identification, in which portraiture and even more emphatically photographic portraiture participate, we see two developments – already taking place in the late nineteenth century – which depart from mimetic representation: one is identification through a subject’s indexical bio-trace (e.g. in the use of fingerprints); the other is the use of statistics drawn from large data sets.48 The anti-portrait, while departing from or even opposing mimetic representation and the ontology of the subject that this implies, draws

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on these alternative modes of identification without necessarily affirming their normative social uses. For example, just as Struth mines the uncanniness of family resemblance, so Thomas Ruff in his Other Portraits (1994–5) returns to the method of the superimposition of facial images pioneered by eugenicist Francis Galton, not to identify racial ‘types’ but to destabilize the relation of the face to the portrait in such a way that the composite face becomes distinct from the portrait as a representation of a self that is identical with itself.49 An alternative model of portraiture-by-replication grows out of the indexical anti-portraits of the 1960s such as Morris’s Self-Portrait (EEG) and O’Doherty’s Portrait of Marcel Duchamp. An example of portraiture-by-replication would be Marc Quinn’s Self (1991), a portrait made from a cast of the artist’s frozen blood; every five years the process is repeated in order to register the subject’s ageing. The idea of the life-mask is hence linked to a biological substance framed by a technology (the freezer) that refers to the sterile hospital environment and a medicalized relation to death. A later portrait made by Quinn which abandons resemblance altogether, A Genomic Portrait: Sir John Sulston (2001), is made from a sample of DNA from the sitter’s sperm, using bacteria to replicate the DNA segments.50 Both collectively and in specific artworks the process of portraiture may now take place through replication rather than representation. This applies both to biological processes and to the digital medium. The portrait would be formed not by making a representation based on resemblance to the subject but by the replication of a piece of the subject. Heather Dewey-Hagborg constructs faces from DNA. While she has made a self-portrait in this way, mostly she uses genetic evidence left in hair, fingernails, chewing gum and cigarette butts to create the portraits of strangers. She sequences genomes and enters the data into a computer, allowing an algorithm to generate the face of the person concerned using 3D printing.51 The portrait is thus not the copy of a model but the materialization of code, in a way that exemplifies a forensic relation to the image  – the image or trace as evidence  – rather than one based on mimesis. What is produced in this way is not a copy but a replication. The idea of replication applies to the way in which images that spread rapidly and widely on the internet are described as being ‘viral’.52 If replication has become the basis for a certain kind of anti-portrait within a conventional framework of distribution, the ‘selfie’ marks a re-mediation of representation within a quasi-biological technical form of replication as a mode of distribution. The selfie, even if high definition, is what Hito Steyerl has dubbed a ‘poor image’; that is, an image that is light enough to travel easily (with the state of technology, although images no longer need to be so condensed in order to do that).53 A particular genre of selfie involves the self-depiction of the subject’s body, often

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using a mirror so that the act of making the picture is itself reflected. While the networked quality of the selfie is new, this visual format is well-established in the history of portraiture, for example, in Johannes Gump’s Self-Portrait (1646), which shows the artist from behind both reflected in a mirror and painting his self-portrait on a canvas; the similarly structured comical version in Norman Rockwell’s Triple Self-Portrait (1960); or Ilse Bing’s Self-Portrait in Mirrors (1932) where Bing photographs herself head-on in a mirror while being reflected in profile in another. More recently Amalia Ulman’s Excellencies and Perfections (2014) has played on the mirror trope, exploiting the sequencing made possible by Instagram to create a fictional narrative self-portrait and distributing the constituting images in such a way so as to obfuscate their identification as artworks.54 This goes in precisely the opposite direction to the Brechtian approach to self-representation in the 1960s, for example, in Dan Graham’s Performer/ Audience/Mirror (1977), where the artist faces a mirror opposite the audience, so both he and they are reflected; Graham verbally describes what he sees in such a way that the performance becomes a deconstruction of self-portraiture. By using the technologies of networking, the selfie also transforms the traditional perspectival theatre of representation that is the basis of the portrait. The ‘audience’ becomes the multitude of self-portraitists in a way that is no longer centred theatrically and according to the position of the privileged vanishing point or camera but rather rapidly distributed through a global network. This does not mean that power is democratized or redistributed, as was the aspiration behind the decapitation of the sovereign: rather, it loses its location. If portraiture functioned primarily in the ancient world on coinage, where the profile of the ruler served to legitimate the value of the coin just as the circulation of the coinage showed the reach of his power, it is the process of circulation that validates and indeed capitalizes the selfie, indicated, for example, by the number of ‘likes’ on Facebook, which generates advertising revenue for the corporation. Portraiture in the West has always been connected with value. From the sixteenth century onwards it also evokes a relation of intimacy. The selfie thus emerges at the high point of the financialization of intimate life that has been underway since the eighteenth century.55

From bio-power to data-power The portrait has always faced two directions simultaneously:  towards death and towards life. Death is evoked in the portrait’s anticipation of outlasting the subject; life in the portrait comes to be that which is susceptible to bio-power.56

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During the nineteenth century the portrait is associated with bio-power through physiognomic metrics; through the use of photography to identify criminals and other ‘types’; and through its uses in colonialist ethnography. Life becomes the object of knowledge, surveillance, control and exploitation, with the portrait as one of the places in which this project is secured – and continues to be in the facial recognition technology incorporated into passports and used to maintain the control of populations. In the twenty-first century bio-power is converted into data-power:  from indexical registration (the identity photo, biometric measurement, the fingerprint and so forth) to data registration (websites visited, purchasing history, financial records, even browsing habits, such as for how long and how far down one reads or looks at something on the screen). Whereas the profile for bio-power in its classical period derives from and is represented in the visual, the data-portrait creates a profile through algorithmic operations that connect the individual subject’s data with big data. The visuality of surveillance is replaced by code. Rather than looking in a mirror, the subject monitors the data produced by their own body and their activities. While using different methods, data profiling poses a similar question concerning the relation of life to biometric identification. From the 1870s, Alphonse Bertillon, a police officer, developed a method of applying biometrics to the photograph as a way of identifying criminals; Cesare Lombroso sought to produce a taxonomy of criminal types by measuring facial features with the aid of photography; and Francis Galton tried to identify the physiognomy of criminal types by overlaying photographic images.57 All these procedures normalize life through comparative measurement and do so by relating the individual photographic portrait to the archive.58 Individuating features become information that can be transmitted quickly. Big data means that the population for comparison and algorithmic analysis has increased enormously. How might art respond to these modes of identification based on the measurement of life, whether that be via the appearance of the body or the registration of its actions? At one time, in response to identification based on visuality, the alternative would have been provided by strategies of mimetic disruption:  Breton’s selfportrait Automatic Writing uses collage to present both at the same time, the frozen self-portrait photograph and the dream-life, and Cindy Sherman uses a prophylactic mimesis of genre stereotypes of femininity. In each case the concept of depth (whether that is soul, interiority or reason) has changed from that of the traditional portrait. For Breton, ‘depth’ manifests as automatism and the shock of collage; for Sherman in certain images as either an out-of-frame or the abjection of a forensic mise en scène. Christian Boltanski’s Ten Photographic

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Portraits of Christian Boltanski (1946–64, 1972) consists of ten black and white photographs supposedly of their subject with his age and the date the photograph was purportedly taken written underneath. Only the last one seems to have a resemblance to the artist as an adult, but even of that we cannot be sure, and the pictures may not even all be of boys. Nonetheless, they capture a moment in a child or young person’s life and are referred to the archive, specifically the family photo-album. But, most likely found photographs, they refer rather to a collective archive, serving to throw into question the representation of an essential and continuous individual naturalized by the traditional portrait.59 The individual is replaced by the relation between the singular and the generic, which provides also for their ethical basis: in each case the sitter was a singular, irreplaceable person in front of the camera who left his or her trace and memory on the celluloid. The generic, in effect, stands for the threat of oblivion. For Sherman and Boltanski, the portrait as representation relates not to an interiority but to the archive. With the advent of digitalization, the internet and the accumulation of vast files of data, interiority has been turned inside-out by surveillance and datamining, in a way that collapses the distinction between private and public. Today the anti-portrait offers a way of dealing with a system of data profiling which in effect turns the subject’s every online action, or credit or loyalty card transaction, into unpaid labour. The supermarket at which you shop wants to create a portrait of you. In the 1960s artists such as Robert Morris responded to consumer culture’s mass media depictions of the subject by rejecting the iconographic in favour of the indexical; today that approach no longer works, since it is life at the level of the indexical that is being converted into data. Hence the renewed recourse by artists to fiction, metafiction, para-fiction and quasi-fiction in an attempt to baffle identification and reveal the real functions of virtual entities. If the traditional self-portrait implies a privileged access of the self to itself, and an ontology of ‘possessive individualism’,60 this is thrown into question both by the idea of the unconscious – that at the most intimate level of ourselves there is an opacity or blank  – and by our consciousness of the variously mediated character of all representations. If the self-portrait is capable of intimating a truth unknown even to the artist, what happens when that which escapes the artist migrates from the interior to the outside? Or, to be more precise, when the interior becomes the outside, not only in the sense of mediation through already existing representations but also through the way in which the self is constructed – and in terms of information ‘portrayed’ – by an Other.

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The algorithmic construction of the subject by digital profiling and surveillance – the shadow that falls from the internet onto the subject – is only to a small degree voluntary.61 Whatever the individual subject compiles is exceeded by the tracking and digital surveillance conducted by external parties, including multiple commercial and government agencies that one might composite into a big Other. Erica Scourti’s artist’s book The Outage: Her Story (2014) (Figure 2.7) is a ‘ghostwritten memoir’ as it is described by the publisher Banner Repeater; the ghostwriter J.  M. Harrington was provided with material on the artist gleaned by internet security experts that she had commissioned to investigate her, drawing on her web presence in social media, URLs from her searches, Amazon recommendations and what could be obtained of her emails. This bears comparison with Sophie Calle’s La Filature (variously translated as The Detective or The Shadow), for which the artist asked her mother to hire a private detective to follow her around Paris taking surveillance photographs of her activities, which were then published alongside the detective’s report. Calle’s project depends on the referential status of the photograph as a trace of the subject,

Figure 2.7  Erica Scourti, detail from The Outage: Her Story (2014). Paperback book published by Banner Repeater paperbacks. Courtesy the artist.

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since, according to Calle, these would ‘prove her existence’.62 This contrasts with the collection of digital information in Scourti’s project, another kind of trace that does not have the same existential connection with the subject’s presence as does the photograph, but is rather used by comparison with databases to predict future behaviour and choices. The implication of this is that we are all continually being algorithmically written; Scourti’s conceit using a ghostwriter is a way of simultaneously taking and relinquishing control: on the one hand, she takes control of what otherwise takes place outside the subject; but at the same time, she relinquishes personal control to the ghostwriter who becomes a conduit for recovering the expropriation of the self by corporations and advertisers, while avoiding the claims to autonomy, authenticity and privileged truth of autobiographical self-appropriation. If individuation is now performed by the Other, in the form of corporate data-harvesting for the purpose of targeted advertising, rather than attempting to withdraw or taking the act on oneself, an alternative way out might be to commission another other, a ‘ghost’, to create a ‘memoir’ (in the sense of Breton’s 'novel' Nadja), to approach the real of the subject through a mode that is undecidable in relation to fiction and reality, which is appropriate to a world in which the virtual is real while bodies enjoy, suffer and die. If the portrait has shifted from an artistic genre to a generalized expression of power and monetization, the struggle inherent in the pose of the portrait has also shifted from the confrontation with the portraitist to one with the very technologies (both hardware and software) though which life today is lived: Facebook and Google as our portrait painters at the service of Capital.63 If this is the case could it be that resistance, rather than being inherent in performance as a taking hold of the processes of revealing and concealing (as it would be in the classic portrait), takes place in non-performance as a maintaining of opacity as non-disclosure? If a crucial moment of the portrait is that of the performative, of the subject self-constituting through the repetition of citation, then non-performance would be a refusal of what is on offer, a withholding of potential that is inherent in the very notion of potential itself.64 This may perhaps be the most radical moment of the ‘anti-portrait’.

Diaries and data-portraits The slide between the index and data is the focus of Susan Morris’s work, which may be characterized as an exploration of the possibilities of the anti-portrait

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in such a situation. In a series of prints, including Medication and Mood Swings (both 2006), Morris presented charts and diagrams based on conventional year planners where ‘data-portraits’ (drawing on Edward Tufte’s visual information design) replace pictorial depictions of the temporal subject. As portraits, we might read these as the unruly subject’s self-disciplining into a formal system, while also leaking out of that very system. There is a divergence between structure, which follows from the temporal sequence of the events on the year planner, and the creative decisions concerning colour, which are undetermined in relation to function. The diagram’s usual purpose of producing knowledge is reversed, and it becomes opaque in relation to the inferences that we are forced to draw from its unreadable patterns. Abstraction is therefore given a double valence: on the one hand, it mimes the conversion of experience into data which renders exchangeable the singularity of the indexical (there at that moment the subject was in an unrepeatable situation which can be segmented into standardized units and tagged), while on the other hand it produced an experience which we could name ‘aesthetic’, marking the work as resistant to decoding. Morris’s ‘year planner’ works are anti-portraits not only because (unlike the conventional portrait) they are non-representational but also because as abstractions they exist in this double condition of standardization and opacity. They also become an indication of ‘real abstraction’ in Capital:  the way in which abstraction functions concretely in life and subject becomes abstract and exchangeable.65 The anti-portrait may become a way of both reflecting and creating a glitch in this process. Before it became a popular thing to do with the explosion of the culture of the quantified self and its health-tracking apps, Morris wore a device on her wrist, a medical Actiwatch, that recorded her phases of activity and slumber for five years (a reference to the song by David Bowie), recording different periods of activity and ambient light, activity only and ambient light only.66 Returned to the lab, the data was used to produce diagrams, or ‘actigraphs’. Biological life is converted into data which becomes information to be organized, from which can be read periods of sleep and wakefulness, and the routines and irregularities of bodily existence. Just as the conventional portrait is the representation of a being who exists over time in a spatial image, these anti-portraits organize temporal information in a ‘graph’. Made into Jacquard tapestries for a commission by the Wellcome Trust for the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, completed in 2012, and continuing afterwards, the vertical axis of the Sun Dial: Night Watch series shows the activity over 365 days of one year, while for the horizontal axis one thread is allocated to each minute of every day, making the height 1440 threads,

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thus (depending on the thickness of the threads) determining the size of the tapestry. The production process contributes to the materiality into which the data is translated: the width of the loom fixes the width of the tapestry, with the thickness of the yarn threads determining its height. Subjective time converted into data is literally woven on a Jacquard loom, a machine that was the original model for Charles Babbage’s ‘analytical engine’, the proto-computer developed in the 1830s, for which Ada, Countess of Lovelace, produced what has been claimed to be the first computer algorithm.67 Instead of the relation to a mirror-image, which implies an open-eyed selfconsciousness, what may still – just – be called a self-portrait has become a selfmonitoring over time through technology that records with equal attention the phases of wakefulness and the fall into sleep. As Margaret Iversen writes, ‘In effect, the medical device created an aniconic self-portrait restricted to bodily motion in time.’68 As ‘aniconic’, narrative, whether fictional or not, is also excluded: the only continuity of the self is the temporal sequence of its archiving. The tapestries are based on the conversion of an analogue continuum into segments of data, and thus involve the very process of digitalization in sound recording and digital photography, which involves the ‘sampling’ of light or sound.69 Included in the final diagram are ‘blanks’ where uploading was either in the process of taking place or had been forgotten, points of elision or non-information which mark the place of the Real of the subject. While the traditional portrait is a representation made to resemble the sitter who knowingly presents him or herself, with this kind of anti-portrait emphasis is placed on the less conscious or controllable aspects of registration, as in the shadow and photography. But whereas the performative dimension of the portrait involves an act of enunciation and self-presentation as its basis, this is not the case with Morris’s anti-portraits which derive in a first step from automatic procedures, bio-physical processes and affective intensities. This raises the question of how, in such a situation, subjectification takes place, and how its relationship to self-representation might be understood. If through the application and generalization of a photographic model and its relation to the shadow, the portrait comes to be perceived as a precipitate, and if this notion of precipitation is extended to our digital lives, how might this reflect back on the diary as an episodic form that disrupts the closure of the self-portrait? Susan Morris’s work-in-progress, provisionally titled De Umbris Idearum (Figure 2.8), comprises twelve volumes of diaries produced using the software Evernote corresponding to the months of the year 2011. The volumes are designed to recall the Penguin Freud Library, raising the question of the

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Figure 2.8  Susan Morris, De Umbris Idearum [of the Shadow Cast by Our Thoughts] (2019). 12 × soft back books, each 21.5 × 13 cm, with shelf. Printed paper and wood, 25 × 95 cm. Image courtesy of Bartha Contemporary.

relation of the diaristic subject to the psychoanalytic one and of what constitutes the unconscious in the epoch of the digital and the internet. The title, ‘On the Shadows of Ideas’, is taken from The Rings of Saturn (1995) by W. G. Sebald.70 The book displays Sebald’s interest in seventeenth-century texts that precede the modern novel, including the doctor and antiquary Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial, or, a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk (the county where Sebald lived) which Sebald uses as a model for his own approach. The seventeenth-century mode of writing involved compilation, a gathering of quotations from various sources including the Classical authors, but also hearsay and gossip, that together formed an archive. The author was a collector and conduit, rather than being conceived as an original creator, as came to be the case from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries.71 Whereas the analogue author reads in the library or goes out to research, the digital author searches on the internet and saves selected items from the results. This is not the private

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expression of the eighteenth- or nineteenth-century diarist writing in an enclosed room, which presupposes an essential interior being of the subject that remains to be discovered (an idea already challenged in the eighteenth century by Tristram Shandy) but rather a subjectivity formed in exteriority, the ‘I’ fading into the ‘outsides’, the shadows. Traditionally, daily ‘impressions’ are what the diarist records in the diary.72 The subject is a relay between impression and inscription, and the requirement that it is done daily reduces the delay, which increases the truth value by minimizing second thoughts and ultimately retrospective closure. The end of the diary is marked by abandonment or death. Implied here is a contradiction between the subject as an autonomous and free source of thoughts and actions, and the subject as an inscribing machine. The truth of automatism is that the subject is already dead when it seems most alive, nervous like the twitching legs of Garvani’s electrified frog. Technology has enabled the archiving and self-archiving process to be speeded up from daily or hourly to instantaneously. The subject may be constantly receiving/inscribing, and the reception may be nothing more than a capture or grab. Whereas in the diary the impression is synthesized at least on a micro-level with some degree of second reflection, in the contemporary technological situation in a programme like Evernote there is no synthesis, only parataxis, one thing beside another, ready for algorithmic searching.73 If these grabs are considered as comparable to photographs, then they ‘describe the world seen without a self ’, as Anne Banfield puts it quoting Virginia Woolf.74 According to Banfield, photography is paralleled in writing by the ‘style indirect libre’, whereby ‘the novel contains sentences with deictics which can be said to represent the perspective of no one; not objective, centreless statements, but subjective yet subject-less, they render the appearances of things to no one, akin in this to the light-sensitive plate’.75 Perhaps the rendering of ‘no one’, this subject of subject-less sentences, would involve a precipitation out of parataxis, something emerging like a crystal from the dataflow, a self-portrait revealed out of saves and annotations, a kind of accretion around the empty and deictic ‘I’. This is the inverse of Mark Wallinger’s reflections on the self-portrait, where the separation of the ‘I’ as rendered massively iconic as a black column equal to his own height on a pedestal in Self (Times New Roman) contrasts with the Id paintings (2015–), gestures in black paint on white canvas keyed to his body height, which in their symmetry resembles vast Rorschach ink blots for psychological testing. Susan Morris’s project in the diaries is different: to constitute the ‘I’ in and out of the index, where the index is extended from the mark by contact to the actual process of

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registration and precipitation over time. The ‘column’ of the ‘I’ is replaced by the ‘pilotis’ of the notes, to use a term Dennis Hollier applies to the index cards favoured by Michel Leiris and Roland Barthes.76 Instead of being either full or empty, or both at once, the shifter flickers. Another model for Morris’s project is Moyra Davey’s Index Cards in the book Speaker Receiver, which has entries describing the artist’s life, apartment, illness, reading, projects and travel, and includes many quotations.77 Davey’s work, which includes photographs, films and writing, could constitute an indirect self-portrait comprising analogue traces, photochemical images (some of which are of vinyl records) and dust. In her book The Problem of Reading Davey remarks on Virginia Woolf ’s discovery in a second-hand bookshop, of a woolmerchant’s chronicle of a business trip through Wales written a century before and describes the elicitation of hollyhocks and hay that it offers Woolf as ‘an almost Proustian evocation of the serendipitous, sensory retrieval of memory’.78 Of course the difference with Proust is that the memory is not her own, whether ‘her’ here is Woolf or Davey; we could say that it is a memory that has become orphaned, unowned, like the subject-less precepts of the style indirect libre and the photograph. Rather than pre-existing in a continuum, the subject is produced through these chance encounters and revealed through links that are as much a surprise to the author/artist as to the reader or viewer. The temporally alternating activity and exhaustion of Davey’s work, tinged by accumulation and memento mori and unfolding slowly in essays conducive to rumination, contrasts with the pace set by the digital archiving process in Morris’s Evernote captures where annotation virtually accompanies registration, although the latter are ultimately and ironically returned to the ‘slow’ book form and psychoanalytic production of the ‘I’ through a trail of associations that Morris shares with Davey. If the ‘classic’ portrait is an iconic sign of an Imaginary ‘me’, the anti-portrait as it emerges in the 1960s articulates the Symbolic (word-portraits like those of Bochner) and the Real (indexical portraits like Robert Morris’s Self-Portrait (EEG) and O’Doherty’s Portrait of Marcel Duchamp). Susan Morris’s antiportraits, beginning with the problem of the ‘I’ in relation to its intermittences, blanks and shadows, takes something like a fourth position, not so much a move from icon to symbol and index, or from the imaginary to the symbolic and real, but rather a process akin to a destructive/productive knotting and unknotting, or weaving and unpicking. The connection of unpicking to Freud’s description of mourning in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ should not be missed here79 and returns us to the scenario of Butades’s daughter and her father’s act in creating a portrait from her circumscription of the shadow, concealing the trace through

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its presence, with the anti-portrait as an undoing through a paratactic shadowwriting of this determination by the Other.

Remarking singularity and the face If the idea of representation is what links the baroque absolute monarchy with modern democracies, it is also the paradigm that underwrites portraiture. Foucault evokes analogy in The Order of Things and This Is Not a Pipe as a murmuring or rumbling of difference and similitude that continues beneath the uniform order of representation, emerging in a dissident or outsider avantgarde.80 This kind of analogy is no longer the hierarchical analogy of medieval theological ontology, leading upwards through participation and identification to God, but rather a flat analogy, where anything can be like and unlike anything else without hierarchy. This means that each artwork has to establish its own procedure of likeness and difference. In his essay on Archimboldo, Roland Barthes compares the sixteenth-century Italian painter’s composite heads named after the seasons to the game known as Chinese portraits:  someone leaves the room, the others decide on someone to be identified, and when the questioner returns he must solve the riddle by the patient interplay of metaphors and metonymies: If it were a cheek, what would it be? – A peach. If it were a ruff? – Ears of ripe wheat. If it were an eye? – A cherry. I know: it’s Summer.81

Through the double articulation of the portrait  – as face and agricultural produce – Archimboldo introduces the play of analogy. His The Lawyer (1556), composed of meat and fish, is supposed to be the portrait of a specific person, maybe Calvin: the analogy produces monstrosity that transgresses the separation of realms and surprising metamorphosis. The possibility of the anti-portrait relies on an ‘as’ that exceeds ‘seeing as’ to the extent that it posits and depends upon an ontology of analogy rather than representation.82 We could equally say that in an age of visual surveillance (the age before our own as the modality of surveillance has changed and magnified) the anti-portrait is an attempt to maintain the withdrawal that was essential to but could no longer be sustained by the representational portrait. ‘Anti-portrait’ can be read in two ways: against the portrait and alternative to the portrait. The ‘against’ moment was an anti-representational one that repeats itself in the avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde, culminating in Conceptual

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art. Each time this move also opened up new avenues for portraiture, from the performative portrait (already present in Duchamp’s Rrose Sélavy persona) to the word-portrait and the analogical object-portrait. Digitalization and the emergence of networked communications both reframed the analogue as a mode of portraiture through trace and resulted in new relations to and uses for information, including self-monitoring, personal information and profiling in relation to big data, which are manifest in the data-portrait. There is no doubt that the questions ‘how are we represented and how do we represent ourselves’ have received new answers. But is it any longer a question of representation at all? Data works not by representation but through the interplay of sameness and difference. The individual is configured as a result of this process, not as its origin. The task for the contemporary artist is to find ways of stalling or interrupting that process, through obfuscation and ‘obtuse meaning’, indeterminacy or the foregrounding of singularity insofar as that has not already been algorithmically programmed.83 The face, according to the philosopher of the ethical, Emmanuel Lévinas, is one of the ways in which the immediate demand of the other, that precedes knowledge and representation, is sensibly felt prior to any intentionality:  ‘The face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me’; it is a face that speaks.84 If the portrait makes an ethical claim as face rather than as representation, it need not be literally a face. Donald Rodney’s My Mother, My Father, My Sister, My Brother (1997) is a miniscule house-like structure made with the artist’s own skin, discarded from a hip operation resulting from his sickle cell anaemia (which only affects those of African descent), held together with pins. This has been photographed in the palm of the artist’s hand, with the photo work titled In the House of My Father.85 This could be regarded as a portrait of his family, as a house, made from a piece of himself, the skin unique to him as a singular being but also marking his heritage and his relations with others. We have moved from confrontation with an order as if there were an outside to it that we or at least the other could occupy, to a provocation of anomalies within it. It is no coincidence that Lisa (voiced by Jennifer Jason Leigh), the one character in the film Anomalisa (2015, dir. Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson) other than the protagonist (a public relations book author, voiced by David Thewlis), who has a voice that is different from all the others (all of whom are voiced by the same actor, Tom Noonan), has a burn scar on the side of her face. The faces of all the characters in this stop-motion animation film are shown by their seams to be masks over their dummy workings, which makes our identification with them all the more remarkable. We might recall here the

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moment in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, when the narrator sees an old woman who raises her head from her hands, leaving the face behind,86 a horrifying image, except that in Anomalisa, instead of flesh, there is nothing behind it but mechanism. It is an anomaly in the face itself that marks out Lisa as not just ‘individual’ – the instance of a type, which she also is, as a shy call centre operator from a small town – but rather as singular. This is not the withdrawal that characterized the traditional portrait, but an obtuse mark, a disruption to the normal surface. If the source or narrative of this mark or scar is withheld, this is perhaps because, in the refusal to mitigate it by a story, it is nothing other than a mark of singularity.87 If the face and the head are ways of interrupting the representation associated with traditional portraiture, what would serve as the interruption of data flows and the kinds of exploitation and control associated with them? And if that interruption is an ‘anti-portrait’, what would come after? Would it – could it – manifest itself in a wholly other kind of possibly unhuman or post-human portraiture?

Notes 1 See the discussion of the selfie in Nicholas Mirzoeff, How to See the World: An Introduction to Images, From Self-Portraits to Selfies, Maps to Movies, and More (London: Penguin, 2016), pp. 31–69. 2 Johannes Hoff, The Analogical Turn: Rethinking Modernity with Nicholas of Cusa (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013). See also Eric Alliez, Capital Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 197–239. 3 Jean-Luc Nancy, L’Autre Portrait (Paris: Galilée, 2014), pp. 59–60. 4 For Protestantism and portraiture, see Mary G. Winkler, ‘Calvin’s Portrait: Representation, Image, or Icon’, in Seeing Beyond the World: Visual Arts and the Calvinist Tradition, ed. Paul Corby Finney (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), pp. 243–63; Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 411; and Joanna Woodall, ‘Introduction: Facing the Subject’, in Portraiture: Facing the Subject, ed. Joanna Woodall (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 1–25. 5 Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 423. 6 For the ‘paradox of sovereignty’ that ‘consists in the fact that the sovereign is, at the same time, outside and inside the juridical order’, see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 15.

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7 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970), pp. 3–18. 8 For the subject as a transcendental-empirical doublet, see Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 347. 9 See the journal that Georges Bataille edited during 1936–9, with the figure on the cover drawn by André Masson, Acéphale (Paris: J.M. Place, 1936). 10 See Julia Kristeva, The Severed Head: Capital Visions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); and Regina Janes, Losing Our Heads: Beheadings in Literature and Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2005). 11 Daniel Arasse, The Guillotine and the Terror (London: Allen Lane, 1989), pp. 134–41; for Barthes on the relation of the click of the shutter to death, see Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), p. 15. 12 See Frances Larson, Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found (London: Granta, 2014), pp. 111–14. 13 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 310, §589; and Rebecca Comay, Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011) for the implications of this in terms of pure negativity. 14 Théodore Géricault, Guillotined Heads, made 1810s, oil on canvas, Stockholm, Nationalmuseum. See Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, ‘Géricault’s Severed Heads and Limbs: The Politics and Aesthetics of the Scaffold’, The Art Bulletin, 74(4) (1992), 599–618. 15 John Berger, ‘The Changing View of Man in the Portrait’, in The Moment of Cubism, and Other Essays (New York: Pantheon, 1969), pp. 41–7. 16 Michel Giroud has used the phrase ‘antiportrait, phonétique et syllabique’ to describe Hausmann’s collage Gurk (1919) published in Der Dada, No. 2, a portrait of a poet in which the face is replaced by clippings of text including ads and nonsense words, in Raoul Hausmann and Michel Giroud, Je ne suis pas un photographe (Paris: Chêne, 1975), p. 24. 17 For a detailed account of non-mimetic portraiture in 1960s America see Kathleen Merrill Campagnolo, ‘In the Company of Cultural Provocateurs: Radical Portraiture in the 1960s’, in This Is a Portrait If I Say So: Identity in American Art, 1912 to Today, ed. Anne Collins Goodyear, Jonathan Frederick Walz and Kathleen Merrill Campagnolo (New Haven and London: Bowdoin College Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2016), pp. 61–89. 18 Rosalind Krauss, ‘The Mind/Body Problem: Robert Morris in Series’, in Robert Morris, ed. Julia Bryan-Wilson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), p. 78; thanks to Mark Godfrey for reminding me of this work. 19 Krauss, ‘The Mind/Body Problem: Robert Morris in Series’, p. 80; see the illustration on p. 79.

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20 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘Residual Resemblance: Three Notes on the Ends of Portraiture’, in Face-Off: The Portrait in Recent Art, ed. Melissa E. Feldman (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1994), p. 56. 21 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 1–11. 22 See Mark Godfrey, ‘Language Factory: An Interview with Mel Bochner on Words, Portraits, Roget’s Thesaurus, Colour, Jorge Luis Borges, Humour, Nostalgia and Political Engagement’, Frieze, December 2004. http://www.frieze.com/article/ language-factory (accessed 3 April 2016). 23 This is congruent with Judith Butler’s account of the performative constitution of identities in Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (London: Routledge, 1993). 24 See also Donna Gustafson, ‘Couples and Doubles: Reflections on the Double Portrait’, in Striking Resemblance: The Changing Art of Portraiture, ed. Donna Gustafson and Susan Sidlauskas (Munich: Prestel/Zimmerli Art Museum, 2014). 25 Pliny, Natural History: Books XXXIII-XXXV (London: Harvard University Press, 1952); for a discussion see Michael Newman, ‘The Marks, Traces, and Gestures of Drawing’, in The Stage of Drawing: Gesture and Act: Selected from the Tate Collection, ed. Avis Newman and Catherine de Zegher (London: Tate, 2003). 26 Maurice Blanchot, Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 32. 27 Blanchot developed this idea in ‘Two Versions of the Imaginary’, in The Space of Literature, trans. Anne Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), pp. 254–63. 28 Roman Jacobson, ‘Shifters, Verbal Categories, and the Russian Verb’, in Selected Writings, Vol. II (The Hague: Mouton, 1971). 29 There is an excellent discussion of this work in relation to Afred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, in Rye Dag Holmboe, ‘The Ubu Effect’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University College London, 2016). 30 Morris had previously also made the ‘dance work’ Column (1960), in which a column the height of a person was supposed to topple over with the initial idea that the artist was to make it fall from inside, until a rehearsal caused him an injury, and the sculptural piece Untitled (Box for Standing) (1961), into which, as evidence by photographs of the work, he just fits. 31 At the Southbank Centre, 2009. 32 Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory (Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press in association with Basil Blackwell, 1988). 33 Orphan shadows in metaphysical and surrealist art, and the iconization of the indexical sign, are discussed in Dennis Hollier, ‘Surrealist Precipitates: Shadows Don’t Cast Shadows’, trans. Rosalind Krauss, October, 69 (1994), 110–32; Hollier is

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Anti-Portraiture drawing on the discussion of the shifter in modern art in Rosalind Krauss, ‘Notes on the Index’, in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 196–219. For a discussion of the box container in relation to the role of the file card in literary self-portraiture, see Dennis Hollier, ‘Notes (On the Index Card)’, October, 112 (2005), 40. For a discussion of anti-portraiture in relation to HIV and AIDS, see Fiona Johnstone’s chapter in this present volume, ‘Relics, Remains and Other Objects: Non-Mimetic Portraiture in the Age of AIDS’. Robert Nickas, ‘Felix Gonzalez-Torres: All the Time in the World’, in Felix Gonzalez-Torres, ed. Julie Ault (New York: Steidl, 2006), pp. 39–51 (49). GonzalezTorres is referring to another series of works, with ‘Lover Boys’ in the title, where he uses his and Ross’s together for the pile of candies: for example, “Untitled” (Lover Boys) (1991) (candies individually wrapped in silver cellophane, endless supply. Ideal weight: 355 lb.) and “Untitled” (Lover Boys) (1991) (blue-and-white candies individually wrapped in cellophane, endless supply. Ideal weight: 355 lb.). This and the quotes that follow are from the letter to Mr. Robert Vifian reproduced in Felix Gonzalez-Torres, ed. Julie Ault, pp. 170–1. While I discuss a number of anti-portraits by women artists, an adequate and systematic discussion of the anti-portrait in relation to feminism and the portrait, and feminist self-portraits, would require a separate chapter. Joachim Gasquet, Cézanne: A Memoir with Conversations, (1897–1906) (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), pp. 163–4. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966), p. 44. For an excellent discussion of the work of Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson, including ‘Mirror, Mirror’ and Twenty Questions (A Sampler), see Kimberly Lamm, ‘Portraits of the Past, Imagined Now: Reading the Work of Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson’, in Unmaking Race, Remaking Soul: Transformative Aesthetics and the Practice of Freedom, ed. Christa Davis Acampora and Angela L. Cotten (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), pp. 103–40. Shocks to the System: Social and Political Issues in Recent British Art from the Arts Council Collection (London: National Touring Exhibitions, South Bank Centre, 1991), p. 66, quoted in Eddie Chambers, ‘The Art of Donald Rodney’, in Donald Rodney: Doublethink, ed. Richard Hylton (London: Autograph, 2003), p. 34. Sarah E. James, ‘Thomas Ruff: Portraying Modernity’, in Thomas Ruff, ed. Iwona Blazwick (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2017), p. 184. For excellent discussions see Joscelyn Gardner: Breeding and Bleeding, exh. cat. (Whitby, Ontario: Station Gallery, 2012). I thank Ros Gray for drawing my attention to Joscelyn Gardner’s work.

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45 Buchloh, ‘Residual Resemblance’. 46 See Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990); Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); and Jacques Derrida, Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 47 Hauser & Wirth online description of the exhibition ‘Roni Horn’, 27 April–28 August 2017, New York. https://www.hauserwirth.com/exhibitions/3084/ronihorn/view/ (accessed 24 January 2018). 48 Both fingerprinting and the use of statistics in relation to identification are discussed in Allan Sekula, ‘The Body and the Archive’, October, 39 (1986), 3–64. 49 See Thomas Ruff: Andere Porträts + 3D (Cantz: Ostfildern, 1995). 50 See Frances Stracey, ‘Bio-Art: The Ethics behind the Aesthetics’, Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology, 10.7, 2009, pp. 497 https://www.nature.com/articles/ nrm2699/figures/1 (accessed 4 August 2018). 51 See ‘A face built from a single hair: Heather Dewey-Hagborg explores the future of genetic surveillance’ https://www.infringe.com/heather-dewey-hagborg/ (accessed 4 August 2018); and ‘Bio-Art: 3D-Printed Faces Reconstructed from Stray DNA’ https://www.livescience.com/50146-art-genetic-data-privacy.html (accessed 4 August 2018). 52 For what is probably the first discussion of this distinction in social philosophy, in terms of the application of contagion to mimesis, see Gabriel de Tarde, The Laws of Imitation (Gloucester, MA: P. Smith, 1962). 53 Hito Steyerl, ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’, E-Flux, 10 (2009), http://www.eflux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/ (accessed 16 December 2017). 54 See Performing for the Camera, ed. Simon Watney and Fiontán Moran (London: Tate, 2016), pp. 210–11; Amalia Ulman, https://www.instagram. com/amaliaulman/?hl=en (accessed 7 April 2016); and Michael Connor, ‘First Look: Amalia Ulman – Excellences & Perfections’, Rhizone, 2014, http://webenact. rhizome.org/excellences-and-perfections and http://rhizome.org/editorial/2014/ oct/20/first-look-amalia-ulmanexcellences-perfections/ (accessed 7 April 2016). 55 Initially this occurred primarily through the novel. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 49–51. 56 ‘Bio-power’ is used by Michel Foucault to refer to the techniques for the regulation and control of bodies and populations that comprise a new formation of power that exploded in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, involving a shift from man-as-body to man-as-species, and from government to monitoring and control of behaviour that increasingly becomes self-monitoring. See Michel

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Anti-Portraiture Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). These techniques are returning using artificial intelligence to analyse the data; see Yilun Wang and Michael Kosinski, ‘Deep Neural Networks Are More Accurate Than Humans at Detecting Sexual Orientation from Facial Images’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 114.2 (2018), 246–57. See the important discussion of this in Sekula. See Sarah Demelo, ‘Autobiography and Self-Portraiture in the Works of Christian Boltanski and Sophie Calle’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Essex, 2011) https://www.academia.edu/3483769/Autobiography_and_Self-Portraiture_ in_the_works_of_Christian_Boltanski_and_Sophie_Calle_PhD_University_of_ Essex_2011 (accessed 4 August 2018). See C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). This is applied to the portrait in Sekula, p. 7. For the algorithmic construction of the subject, see John Cheney-Lippold, We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves (New York: New York University Press, 2017). Quoted in Demelo, ‘Autobiography and Self-Portraiture in the Works of Christian Boltanski and Sophie Calle’, p. 4. For the portrait as pose see Harry Berger, Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt against the Italian Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). My application of the idea of ‘non-performance’ to the anti-portrait has been inspired by a lecture by Fred Moten, ‘Blackness and Non-Performance’ delivered at MOMA, New York, 25 September 2015, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=G2leiFByIIg (accessed 24 December 2017); and by Giorgio Agamben on Herman Melville’s story ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’, in Giorgio Agamben Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel HellerRoazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 243–71, ‘Bartleby, or On Contingency’ (1993). For a discussion, see Alberto Toscano, ‘The Open Secret of Real Abstraction’, Rethinking Marxism, 20.2 (2008), 273–87. From 1 January 2010 to 31 December 2012, Morris wore a watch that recorded both her activity and the levels of light in her immediate environment, which required a data upload every three weeks; for the following two years she wore a watch that recorded activity only and required an upload every six months. For the culture of the quantified self, see Jill Walker Rettberg, ‘Apps as Companions: How Quantified Self Apps Become Our Audience and Our Companions’, in SelfTracking: Empirical and Philosophical Investigations, ed. Btihaj Ajana (London,

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Palgrave Macmillan, 1918), pp. 27–42, where she also deals with the relation of selftracking through apps to diary writing. See Sadie Plant, Zeroes and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture (London: Fourth Estate, 1998). Margaret Iversen, ‘Marking Time: Susan Morris’ Tapestries and Diaries’’, in Sun Dial: Night Watch_Tapestry Dossier, artist’s book (London: Wellcome Trust, 2015), available on www.susanmorris.com/marking-time. This was anticipated by the spinning disk shutter that Étienne-Jules Marey made for his camera so that it would sample movement over time without blurring the images produced. See Iversen, ‘Marking Time’. W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn (London: Vintage, 2002), p. 272; Sebald attributes it to the title of a book by King Solomon in a museum, which may be imaginary, of Sir Thomas Browne; De Umbris Idearum is also the title of a 1584 book by Giordano Bruno, which is discussed in Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). See Markus Krajewski, Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548–1929 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), pp. 49–63. Michael Levenson, ‘Stephen’s Diary in Joyce’s Portrait–the Shape of Life’, ELH, 52.4 (1985), 1017–35. It is notable that parataxis is characteristic of the seventeenth-century pre-novelistic writing of Robert Burton (1577–1640), Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682) and John Aubrey (1626–1697). Ann Banfield, ‘L’Imparfait de l’objectif: The Imperfect of the Object Glass’, Camera Obscura, 8.3 (24) (1990), 64–87 (74). Banfield, ‘L’Imparfait de l’objectif ’, p. 77. Hollier, ‘Notes (On the Index Card)’, p. 39. Moyra Davey, Speaker Receiver (Basel: Kunsthalle Basel, 2010), pp. 9–32. Moyra Davey, The Problem of Reading (Los Angeles: Documents Books, 2003), p. 22. Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in On the History of the PsychoAnalytic Movement, Volume XIV (1914–1916), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press & The Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1993), XIV (1914–16), 243–58. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 64, 76–78, 114, 131–2; and Michel Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 30, 34, 37. Roland Barthes, ‘Archimboldo, or Magician and Rhétoriqueur’, in The Responsibility of Forms (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 130. The phrase ‘seeing as’ refers to Wittgenstein. The use of ‘as’ as a way of extending a function from one kind of object to another is based on a landmark exhibition

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‘As Painting: Division and Displacement’ and its catalogue As Painting: Division and Displacement, ed. Philip Armstrong, Laura Lisbon, and Stephen W. Melville (Columbus, Ohio: Wexner Center for the Arts, 2001). 83 I am thinking here of the ‘obtuse meaning’ in Roland Barthes, ‘The Third Meaning’, in The Responsibility of Forms (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), pp. 41–62; and of the singularity of the ethical relation in Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1969), pp. 187–219. For the ways in which algorithmic inference involves bio-political control of individuality, see John Cheney-Lippold, ‘A New Algorithmic Identity: Soft Biopolitics and the Modulation of Control’, Theory, Culture & Society (Los Angeles: Sage, 2011), 28.6, 164–81. 84 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, pp. 50–1; 52. 85 Donald Rodney, Donald Rodney: Doublethink (London: Autograph, 2003), p. 9. 86 Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage, 1985), p. 7. 87 We might see it as the trauma in representation of a singularizing ‘Thing’ beyond the substitutions of desire (see Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959– 1960: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 43–70), whether these be representational or analogical: the singular as that which is neither the same nor different.

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An anti-portraitist in the realm of letters: Gertrude Stein’s theory of seeing Ery Shin

The opening decades of the twentieth century represent a significant moment in the history of the anti-portrait. Cubism announced the death (and eventual rebirth) of the physiognomic portrait, and Surrealism  – its associations with automatism, the unconscious and language, in particular  – ushered in avantgarde developments in the visual and verbal rendition of human subjects.1 Pablo Picasso is usually granted a central role in this history: his 1912 cubist portraits of the dealers Ambroise Vollard, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Wilhelm Uhde are acknowledged as archetypal anti-portraits,2 while the story behind his 1906 proto-cubist painting of the experimental writer and salon host Gertrude Stein (one she herself originally spread in her clandestine memoir The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas [1933]) is widely considered a foundational myth for the antiportrait as a discernible art-historical phenomenon. The young Picasso spent many months working on a likeness of Stein, but remained unsatisfied with his work.3 That summer, he’d travelled to Spain, where he looked at early Iberian stone sculptures. Returning to Paris in the autumn, he reworked Stein’s image to incorporate the blocky forms and planar surfaces of Iberian art. Untroubled by accusations that the sitter looked nothing like her finished depiction, Picasso replied enigmatically, ‘That does not make any difference, she will.’4 With this, he evinces an indifference toward producing a mimetic reproduction of Stein as she appears to be. What interests the artist is the possibility of seeing Stein as she really is, of stripping away the multiple layers of perceptual experience, to apprehend the thing in itself. Stein herself appears to have accepted this interpretation of events, noting simply, ‘To me, it is I.’5 The above account focuses on Stein as sitter. What has been less often discussed, in art-historical circles at least, is how Stein’s literary practice

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reshaped artistic ideas about what a portrait might be. To that end, this chapter contextualizes Stein’s project by placing her in dialogue with Picasso and other visual artists. Arguing that Stein can be read as ‘an anti-portraitist in the realm of letters’, it pays close attention to their shared philosophy of vision – specifically, a suspicion of mimesis as a privileged mode of representation.

‘Doing with words what Picasso is doing with paint’ Amalgamating impressionist and cubist principles devoted to perceptual immediacy, Stein conceptualized her object descriptions as being firmly situated within the visual tradition. Regarding her own ‘Portrait of Mabel Dodge’ (1912), Stein mused, ‘Well, Pablo [Picasso] is doing abstract portraits in painting. I am trying to do abstract portraits in my medium, words’, a sentiment Dodge herself echoed when she reminisced, ‘In a large studio in Paris, hung with paintings by Renoir, Matisse and Picasso, Gertrude Stein is doing with words what Picasso is doing with paint. She is impelling language to induce new states of consciousness, and in doing so language becomes with her a creative art rather than a mirror of history.’6 In Tender Buttons (1914), in particular, Stein presents a series of household objects – clothes, cutlery and edibles included. On the one hand, they pose as conventional ‘still lifes’ insofar as the author relates those shapes, colours, materials and textures constituting her inanimate surroundings. On the other hand, as in cubist artwork, these forms become splintered within an amoeba-like network of lines – not the semi-transparent planes breaking up a cubist canvas, obviously, but clauses lacking familiar action sequences and subject relations. Herein, the analogies between Stein and Picasso proliferate.7 Like a classical painter, Stein begins with the mimetic function. On the Tender Buttons subsection ‘A Little Bit of a Tumbler’, A shining indication of yellow consists in there having been more of the same color than could have been expected when all four were bought. This was the hope which made the six and seven have no use for any more places and this necessarily spread into nothing. Spread into nothing.

Stein notes: I have used this idea in more places. I  used to take objects on a table, like a tumbler or any kind of object and try to get the picture of it clear and separate in



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my mind and create a word relationship between the word and the things seen. ‘A shining indication of yellow …’ suggests a tumbler and something in it. ‘… when all four were bought’ suggests there were four of them. I try to call to the eye the way it appears by suggestion the way a painter can do it. This is difficult and takes a lot of work and concentration to do it. I want to indicate it without calling in other things. ‘This was the hope which made the six and seven have no use for any more places … .’ Places bring up a reality. ‘… and this necessarily spread into nothing’, which does broken tumbler which is the end of the story.8

I try to call to the eye the way it appears by suggestion the way a painter can do it – sight precedes both sound and anecdotal associations.9 An otherwise typical verbal portrait (in authorial intent, that is) swiftly recedes from view, though, because of the alien way in which Stein frames the world. Much like the young Picasso renounces time-honoured shapes and shading, Stein avoids popular literary imagery. Rarely can commonsensical features and practical uses be glimpsed in Tender Buttons and kindred texts. All this, one adds, in a language very delicately, yet also aggressively, ungrammatical. In the process of pushing against entrenched descriptive patterns  – of being an anti-portraitist in the realm of letters  – Stein dips into modernism’s broader mania for the object–subject divide. Across all mediums, modernists increasingly agonized over baring objects as objectively as possible (what lies beyond clichés, unstained by vulgar platitudes), all the while submerging them in profoundly solitary visions. The subjectivity of subjects, perversely enough, becomes the most prized object within this emerging ultra-objectivist strain. The following passage vividly renders this contradiction in terms. Unbeknown to himself, Thornton Wilder, one of Stein’s closest friends in her later years, internalizes her waffling between theory and practice. In a single sweep, Wilder tells us, Stein freezes the stuff of life itself and the mind it permeates: How, in our time, do you describe anything? In the previous centuries writers had managed pretty well by assembling a number of adjectives and adjectival clauses side by side; the reader ‘obeyed’ by furnishing images and concepts in his mind and the resultant ‘thing’ in the reader’s mind corresponded fairly well with that in the writer’s. Miss Stein felt that that process did not work any more. … In the first place, words were no longer precise, they were full of extraneous matter. They were full of ‘remembering’, and describing a thing in front of us, an ‘objective thing’, is no time for remembering. Miss Stein felt that writing must accomplish a revolution whereby it could report things as they were in themselves before our minds had appropriated them and robbed them of their objectivity ‘in pure existing’. … Miss Stein’s writing is the record of her thoughts,

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Of course, there is no ‘purely existing’ thing in itself, because all things are broached through the prism of human subjectivity, of which language  – an inherently biased, culturally specific medium  – forms a part. All things have always been pre-appropriated in this sense, mediated through our vocabulary, associations and memories. The writer can de-familiarize, but never wholly disassociate, objects from prior connotations. All this isn’t to negate the realistempirical world per se, merely to distinguish that ‘Objectivity’, the ideal, stays once-removed for human subjectivities. Without things in themselves, our bodies included, we wouldn’t exist at all – the universe reduced to a vacuum. Yet we never fully know them in an omniscient sense, as objects floating outside human schemata. Pretending to see certain phenomena for the first time is precisely that:  pretence. The unknown becomes deciphered in light of the known, subsumed under an anthropic system of comparative relations. The movement from mind to penned words likewise undergoes multiple mediations. While language structures, no matter how subliminally, the way we see and relate to the world, the entirety of perceptual experience cannot be contained in language. For the world is an overwhelming material matrix in which language and its users originate. To verbalize the inter-sensory interface comprising consciousness is to selectively narrow down upon the moment (a matter of milliseconds), then formulate this locus through an abstract system. Literature, then, cannot duplicate raw sense-data. To the last, all art, whether visual or verbal, operates as a synthetic and interactive activity, not a passive recording. As E. H. Gombrich, in his landmark study Art and Illusion (1960), pronounced, ‘The forms of art, ancient and modern, are not duplications of what the artist has in mind any more than they are duplications of what he sees in the outer world. In both cases they are renderings within an acquired medium, a medium grown up through tradition and skill – that of the artist and that of the beholder.’11 But whether Stein ever stops trying to immaculately transcribe one-to-one perceptual processes, let alone the wider cosmos, remains uncertain.

Tender Buttons: Ties to Picasso and Cézanne Tender Buttons has invited much scrutiny for enacting, as unapologetically literally as possible, the instantaneous and holistic workings of consciousness – an endeavour only considered trite now because those like Stein, Joyce and Woolf



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brought it to the public’s attention decades ago. When we see things, we see things immediately and all at once in our visual field, itself lacking perceivable edges. (The second we try to detect an edge, our head turns and the field extends.) We also don’t choose what we see when we open our eyes. We simply see the world before us, automatically identifying its contours and adjusting our bodies to match. It requires conscious effort to sustain our attention on specific objects. That screening process is what literary realism recreates when it selects certain events, things and people to narrate over others in sequential order, with any temporal dislocations signposted. Tender Buttons gestures towards the tumult of our senses before any such ordering has occurred. Its language sidesteps lexisyntactical rules to emulate the instantaneous simultaneity by which we behold things. Better yet, Tender Buttons deliberately heightens the threshold of comprehension, so that the world overwhelms consciousness in a deluge of sights, sounds, smells, tastes and textures. This spate of unfiltered visual and mental stimuli translates into a highly stylized chaos, one by now commonly recognized in critical circles. Catharine R.  Stimpson, for instance, broaches the poem in explicitly phenomenological terms: ‘Believing in pluralism rather than monism, [Stein] attends to as many phenomena as possible; to as many simultaneous sensuous, sensible and psychic events and sub-events as she can, and to their relations.’12 Neil Schmitz similarly testifies to Tender Buttons’ play with instantaneous impressions, remarking, ‘Gertrude Stein’s writing of her experience does follow; it records, moment by moment, the play of her mind with the world before her’.13 The recurring theme for both Stein critics is clear: everything as perceived at once. The simultaneous presentation of objects within one’s phenomenological field largely explains Stein’s ties to Picasso, despite how overworked that cubist analogy has become. Like cubist art, Stein’s experimental prose juggles conflicting impulses:  a self-assuredly non-representational art betrays aspirations to ultimate representation. Cubism renounces the illusion of three-dimensional geometry on canvas to accentuate, instead, the self-contained nature of paintings themselves. Art doesn’t refer to reality, but only its own as an artificial construct. Gazing at Picasso’s Still Life with a Bottle of Rum (1911) or Violin and Grapes (1912), one becomes intensely aware of the painting’s presence as a painting – a formal composition as opposed to a placeholder for something else. At the same time, this flaunting of artifice conceals a latent mimetic interest. In a poetic sense, cubist art evokes reality more faithfully than its naturalistic counterpart, since it pays homage to optical illusions and a multi-perspective

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ideal. An object’s various angles (although an exhaustive compilation would be impossible) overlay one another across a carefully manipulated grid. These include surfaces hidden from view when one looks at a subject from a fixed vantage point, surfaces apprehended over time (hence, the suggestion of movement) and, more inwardly, those significations an object bears for us. In this way, cubism unsettles past crafting and viewing practices to recreate our sensory collision with the world. The familiar appears alien as a result. So, too, does Stein, in a paradoxical twist, attribute a hyperrealistic dimension to her non-narrative style. In the essay ‘Poetry and Grammar’ (1935), she writes, ‘[F]‌or me the problem of poetry was and it began with Tender Buttons to constantly realize the thing anything so that I  could recreate that thing. … [T]he noun must be replaced not by inner balance but by the thing in itself and that will eventually lead to everything.’14 Art should access and recount the object-world as transparently as possible. But it isn’t just the urgently multitudinous quality that has enshrined Stein’s and Picasso’s cubist pieces as avant-garde staples. It is also, and more fundamentally, their formal modes themselves. Beyond structuring techniques (simultaneity), I  speak of particular styles here. Recognizable slices of life aren’t rehashed into new wholes, as if conventional images could be exhumed once some perspectives or word groups were eliminated and unscrambled. Picasso’s shapes, lines, colour palate and brush strokes would render his subjects optically unfamiliar even if they were somehow adapted into a classically three-dimensional format. More often than not, however, his objects cannot be reconstituted without necessitating new paintings altogether, their links to typical iconology being so attenuated. While the words ‘Ma Jolie’ and a treble clef can be discerned in it, Picasso’s Ma Jolie (1911–12) fails to deliver a woman’s stable outline. Stein’s word-combinations more tenaciously resist reordering efforts. Aside from isolated extracts – ‘see a fine substance strangely’,15 ‘Act so that there is no use in a centre’16 – Tender Buttons disorients readers through its refusal to yield coherent clauses. Ordinary syntax and contextual relations between agents, actions, settings and characteristics have eroded to the extent that the entire poem assumes a riddling, nonsensical air. Despite prepositions, conjunctions, auxiliaries and main verbs circulating for the most part, Stein’s run-ons, fragments, illogical syllogisms, lists and sound-play (‘A type oh oh new new not no not knealer knealer’17) mystify an otherwise age-old subject:  the household. Stein’s and Picasso’s fractured forms aren’t severed from cultural traditions and biographical circumstances, yet such contexts lose much sway when modernists close in on the world as if they had never seen it before.



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Insofar as they defamiliarize the language by which the everyday world finds form, Stein and Picasso hold Cézanne’s post-impressionist tradition as a vital influence. Cézanne, after all, was one of the first to veer away from regular portraiture’s stereography. Stein, for instance, explicitly acknowledges her interest in Cézanne’s perspectival pantheism in a 1946 interview with Robert Bartlett Haas: ‘Cézanne conceived the idea that in composition one thing was as important as another thing. Each part is as important as the whole, and that impressed me enormously.’18 What she presumably refers to is how, in paintings such as Portrait of a Peasant (1905–6), Cézanne downplays spatial hierarchies by relatively evenly distributing colours or juxtaposing warm and cool tones rather than adopting typical chiaroscuro effects. The softening between objects, human figures included, accompanies this softening between foreground and background, with the artist de-emphasizing marked lines. Inanimate objects consequently become as visually interesting as animate objects; animate objects can be observed as clinically as if they were inanimate objects.19 As Cézanne’s correspondence reveals, such painterly gestures aimed to recall nature’s flickering colours and movement as spontaneously as possible.20 Evidenced in his preoccupation with translating the play of light and therefore of colour across the retina, Cézanne was expanding the impressionist quest to provide unmediated optical sensations. Living in an intellectual climate informed by Ruskin’s ‘innocent eye’ and Edmond and Jules de Goncourt’s ‘optique intellectuelle’,21 impressionist artists struggled to convey the fleeting quality of light moving across a space and its inhabitants. To that end, they painted swiftly, relying on broad, open brush strokes. They painted as though they had never witnessed light transfiguring a landscape before, instinctively practicing Ruskin’s and the Goncourts’ art of detached contemplation. By this, I  mean the push to absorb nature without prejudices. While praising his close friend William Turner in The Elements of Drawing (1857), Ruskin makes the extravagant claim that the ‘whole technical power of painting depends on our recovery of what may be called the innocence of the eye … a sort of childish perception of these flat stains of colour, merely as such, without consciousness of what they signify – as a blind man would see them if suddenly gifted with sight’.22 Like Ruskin, the Goncourt brothers infuse the act of seeing with wonder. Their ideal artist renders the world into an aesthetic phenomenon without sentimentality and reliance on entrenched mannerisms. In the visual arts, this means abandoning straight lines in painting, since, as the brothers say, ‘There is no straight line in Nature. It is a human invention.’23 In the theatre, powerful performances begin from a cast’s disengaged appreciation of its real-life models, as an anecdote of an actress

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coolly studying her dying woman servant illustrates:  ‘Rachel went downstairs in tears and genuinely upset; but before a quarter of an hour had passed, the artiste was completely absorbed in studying the death-agony of the unfortunate woman, who had become a stranger for her, a subject.’24 If the impressionists painted in an intellectual climate informed by the Goncourts, the Goncourts were no less susceptible to impressionist influence. The duo’s literary ideas very much assume an impressionistic sheen, despite being formally aligned with Zola’s naturalism. (The Goncourts were two of Zola’s original mentors, and during Edmond’s later years following Jules’s death, he drew closer to the very ideas he inspired in his one-time pupil.) Throughout their journals, we glimpse an impressionist aesthetic at work, the concentrated immersion in immediate experiential reality. ‘In a word, our ambition has been to show changing humanity in its momentary reality’,25 the pair declare in their preface. ‘[O]‌ur constant endeavor to be true to life in the recording of every stillwarm recollection, hastily set down on paper and not always re-read’, intends to transmit ‘the sharpness of our sensations’.26 Whether on the page or canvas, hurrying to most authentically catch an atmosphere before it fades defines the impressionist mindset.27 Their devotion to what they call ‘exact impression[s]‌’28 ties the Goncourts to the impressionists, the impressionists to Cézanne,29 Cézanne to Picasso and Picasso back to Stein. Stein herself, actually, connects Cézanne with Picasso’s cubism through an analogy between the latter and the First World War: Really, the composition of this war, 1914–1918, was not the composition of all previous wars, the composition was not a composition in which there was one man in the center surrounded by a lot of other men but a composition that had neither a beginning nor an end, a composition of which one corner was as important as another corner, in fact the composition of cubism.30

By describing an allegedly ‘cubist’ war in Cézannesque terms (the ‘one thing was as important as another thing’ mentioned in Stein’s 1946 interview), Stein implicitly affirms Cézanne’s meaningfulness for Picasso. At the root of Picasso’s compositional breakthroughs, Stein insinuates, lies Cézanne’s fresh look outward into the world, his will ‘to free our minds’ in the ‘study [of] beautiful nature’31 or ‘to render the image of what we see, in forgetting everything that appeared before us’.32 Over the course of his career, in depreciating classical value gradation (and so perspectival planes), an evenly blended colour palate, intricate detailing (sharp facial features, etc.), fixed contours and complicated geometric forms, Cézanne took Ruskin’s advice to new heights in canvases from The Boy



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in the Red Vest (1888–90), Bibémus Quarry (1895), The Grounds of the ChâteauNoir (1900–4), to The Large Bathers (1906). Like father, like children: in Picasso (1938), Stein delivers a story of one of Cézanne’s heirs, Picasso, that also becomes her own. Both, for her, adopt a more immediately literal, and ergo alien-seeming, attention towards life. She cites one of Picasso’s phenomenological methods as an example, where he divides the visual field, zooming into one ‘feature’ at a time (on canvas, again, such features may be overlaid or otherwise manipulated, given Picasso’s disinterest in coordinating features into seemly wholes): Really most of the time one sees only a feature of a person with whom one is, the other features are covered by a hat, by the light, by clothes for sport and everybody is accustomed to complete the whole entirely from their knowledge, but Picasso when he saw an eye, the other one did not exist for him and only the one he saw did exist for him and as a painter and particularly as a Spanish painter, he was right, one sees what one sees, the rest is a reconstruction from memory.33

‘I was alone at this time in understanding him,’ Stein continues on the next page, ‘perhaps because I was expressing the same thing in literature.’34 The cubist Stein and Picasso exaggerate the strangeness of things as they are distilled from their visual panorama and concomitant whirlwind of associations.35 Like Picasso, Stein asserts, she seizes what she calls ‘another reality’ buried beneath ‘habits, schools, daily life, reason, necessities of daily life, indolence’.36 For her, both invoke the poetic essence of spontaneous perception before common sense intervenes. Stein believes Picasso’s ‘tomatoe [sic] was not everybody’s tomatoe’, since ‘his effort was not to express in his way the things seen as every one sees them, but to express the thing as he was seeing it’.37 He draws not the fruit we typically purchase at grocery stores, eat in salads, place in bowls, dry in the sun or squeeze into ketchup. Picasso’s tomatoes go beyond these familiar correlations. Much in the same way, Stein’s ‘tender buttons’ are hardly the buttons we fasten every day. *** On Stein’s behalf today, Lyn Hejinian asks, ‘Do the words in which we speak of a thing capture our perception, our thought of it?’38 One step further: Can we perceive something without preconceptions? Working backwards from the second question to the first, a writer cannot describe intentional objects without reference to established vocabularies. (Even conceptual breaks with traditions still posit a relation, being reactive.) The hermeneutical logic defining perception prevents any such creative method: a lifetime of ingrained attitudes towards things

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cannot be perfectly purged, especially when language encapsulates them. Even at its most immediate, the human gaze always remains mediated by circumstances – a place, time, temperament and so on. A view is always a view from somewhere. Too many years of living, talking, reading, listening, using things and relating to our surroundings work against us. The inhumanly unprejudiced look that Ruskin and Stein imagine, that freed from cultural memory, is the stuff of myth. Perception remains, to the last, an interpretative activity.39 Painting perceptual data compounds this personal element. Indeed, as the German impressionist Max Leibermann was all too aware, art never transcribes reality, only abstracts it to varying degrees. In ‘Ein Credo’ (1922), he queries, ‘But isn’t every painting, as soon as it is a work of art, a painting of the imagination?’40 Although the credo ends with a conservative appeal against abstract expressionism and other movements that ‘distort the original image of nature to the point of unrecognizability’,41 its larger point endures, joining countless others to cement art’s subjective nature as fact. For all their enthusiasm for life’s immediacy, even the Goncourts assumed the eye requires instruction to be ‘innocent’ in a certain way. ‘Beauty is what untrained eyes consider abominable’,42 they contend in 1859. Around twenty years later, Edmond reasserts, ‘The real connoisseurs in art are those who make people accept as beautiful something everybody used to consider ugly, by revealing and resuscitating the beauty in it.’43 And in practicing their craft, they welcomed certain artifices, hesitant to over-share private acts in the theatre or write without a ‘hallmark’ style.44 Even Cézanne approached the innocent eye as an ideal. Throughout his letters, art remains a vehicle for individual expression, notwithstanding the artist’s ideological commitment to pure optical reconstructions. To Louis Aurenche, Cézanne counsels, ‘For if a strong feeling for nature … is the necessary basis for any artistic concept, and upon which rest the grandeur and beauty of future work, a knowledge of the means of expressing our emotion is no less essential.’45 Similarly, to Émile Bernard, one of his earliest and in many ways misguided proponents,46 Cézanne recommends, ‘[W]‌e must seek to express ourselves according to our personal temperaments.’47 More broadly still, whether painting or appreciating paintings, whether writing or reading, our preconceptions come into play. Even the impressionists took for granted that their audience would, as Gombrich takes pains to reiterate, ‘rea[d] across brushstrokes’48 to fathom the image at hand, no matter how hazy or unfinished looking. Impressionist art always appeals to the viewer’s critical reflexes. The same goes for Stein, who challenges readers to read her texts within and against an exegetical tradition, itself prone to change.



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But let us turn back to Hejinian’s question. While consciousness possesses a linguistic dimension, language, in and of itself, cannot transparently embody the world-as-constituted-in-consciousness. A text never offers a photographic imprint of an individual’s mind – biases and all – at a given instant, verbal art being discursive by nature (although the extent to which it is so can be debated). (Truth be told, even photographs aestheticize reality by discriminating between subjects and manipulating their appearances, so this analogy somewhat misleads.49) Literature necessarily transmutes intentional objects, as the aggregate of all consciousness surpasses words. Put another way, although perception consists of linguistic elements, one still self-consciously intensifies and crafts them in relation to those structural and stylistic principles defining the literary medium. A kind of internal screening and refining precedes the physical act of writing. In this regard, a text never exists as a carbon copy of any phenomenological process. The minute one decides to ‘photocopy’ one’s thoughts, one approaches the world in literary terms, which is to say in terms of select phenomena recorded in sequence. Sensory impressions, feelings, cogitations well up simultaneously, yet all intentional modes and objects must be recorded one at a time on paper – letters forming words, words forming lines, lines filling pages, all read left to right, top-down, front to back. The written word restructures our attention in a distinct way. A text only offers a textual interpretation of a mind in motion. Words furnish a portion of our experiential awareness of the world, not all of it. To return to the photocopier allusion, a machine can only photocopy what’s already formatted for it: appropriately marked pages. Hans-Georg Gadamer once declared, ‘Language is not one of the means by which consciousness is mediated with the world. Rather, in all our knowledge of ourselves and in all knowledge of the world, we are always already encompassed by the language that is our own.’50 It would be more accurate to say, however, that consciousness organizes itself like a language, yet one not exclusively verbal. Slowly cultivated from that primordial past when the first humans awakened to themselves, verbal language frames the way we see the world, yet the world loses something of its fullness when reconstituted in language. To enter verbal language is to step back from the world. Thus, many of Ariane Mildenberg’s phenomenological statements on Stein’s art, for example, ‘Woolf, Stein and Stevens … seek to expose the world in its pre-givenness and bring to light a pre-conceptual, unmediated experience of this world’51 or ‘By virtue of its grotesque word combinations, the project of Tender Buttons attempts to capture primordial experience prior to the structures of grammar and reason, prior to our acts of naming’,52 dwell on the poetic nature of Stein’s quest, with rhetorical

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emphases on the phrases seeks to expose and attempts to capture – design, not execution. Stein’s word portraits only partially suspend language rules, only partially wrench us away from familiar contexts. To feign otherwise is naiveté or mysticism. Stein’s fiction originates in the fiction that fiction can actualize an epistemological totality. Not only can art flawlessly reproduce the workings of consciousness, but consciousness itself can engulf objects from a clean slate, this Ruskinian stance determining true objectivity for Stein. Her literary attempt to transcend literature continues a longer aesthetic narrative that originates in classical art (Pygmalion’s love story – a quintessential example), gathers theoretical momentum in impressionism and culminates in modernism – the myth of anti-art. Its enduring legacy, paradoxically, remains art’s heightened (by now, near paranoid) self-awareness of its formal scope. On paper, the failure to display things in themselves – no place available for their wordless, palpable reality to reside – has rendered literature more vividly a thing in itself. Rather than rushing to keep pace with events happening to someone somewhere else, one spends more time reading and re-reading individual words and lines, sounding them out, testing their emotional charges and puzzling over discernible traces of meaning (or the meaning of such traces). Literature’s referential function (its referring to agents engaging in certain acts, private meditation included) has, in Stein, grown ever more subtle, shifting, attenuated, inward. By fragmenting this function to a then-unanticipated degree, no other writer has so formidably renewed the text’s intentional properties. The visual, phonetic and imaginative experiences of reading become a marvellously bizarre affair.

‘Pictures’ (1935) and Picasso (1938) In The Making of a Modernist: Gertrude Stein from Three Lives to Tender Buttons (1984), Jayne L. Walker curiously draws back from Stein’s ongoing ambivalence towards Ruskin’s logical fallacy (absolute ocular innocence). I’m not sure, as Walker appears to be, that Stein fully acknowledges the aesthetic impossibility she sets up for herself: to recreate unmediated perceptual experience on the page. The few Tender Buttons passages and authorial statements that Walker musters – most memorably: ‘[I]‌t was not solely the realism of the characters but the realism of the composition which was the important thing, the realism of the composition of my thoughts’53 and ‘[P]ractice the sign that means that really means a necessary betrayal’54  – can all too easily be countered by other lines pulled from other



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places. Ruskin’s ghost haunts Stein still. ‘That is the problem – to write things as they are, not as they seem. Our aim must be not to explain things, but to write the thing itself, and thereby in itself be self explanatory,’ Stein herself admits in a 1935 lecture.55 She rearticulates this intent in ‘Portraits and Repetition’ (1935): ‘I began again not to let the looking be predominating not to have the listening and talking be predominating but to once more denude all this of anything in order to get back to the essence of the thing contained within itself.’56 Stein speaks of essences over appearances, objectivity’s triumph over its counterpart. A faint whiff of sophism enters  – the unspoken assumption that language embodies things without reference to their prior significations for readers. Most urgently addressing art’s mimetic function, Stein’s essay ‘Pictures’ teems with conflicting impulses:  art as art, art as transparently mirroring nature. (‘Pictures’ is, not incidentally, a piece that Walker omits from her book.) When Stein affirms art as art, she writes, ‘Anything once it is made has its own existence and it is because of that that anything holds somebody’s attention. The question always is about that anything, how much vitality has it and do you happen to like to look at it.’57 An oil painting of the Battle of Waterloo, say, holds our attention by the weight of its existence as an oil painting. It cannot conjure the actual battle’s three-dimensional reality, no matter how life-like its surface. Stein is neither provincial nor delusional enough to make such grandiose claims: There it all was the things to see but there was no air it just was an oil painting. I remember standing on the little platform in the center and almost consciously knowing there was no air. … [I]‌t just was an oil painting and it had a life of its own and it was a scene as an oil painting sees it and it was a real thing which looked like something I had seen but it had nothing to do with that something that I knew because the feeling was not at all that not at all the feeling which I had when I saw anything that was really what the oil painting showed. It the oil painting showed it as an oil painting. That is what an oil painting is.58

Other paintings, however, elicit mixed, often obscurely worded emotions. At times, we lose sense of Stein’s meaning or wonder if she’s contradicting herself. An oil painting lives ‘in and for itself ’,59 yet when it captures the world too perfectly, the author wavers. Cazin’s wheat fields ‘discourage’ Stein (‘One does not like to be mixed in one’s mind as to which looks most like something at which one is looking the thing or the painting’60), Shilling’s American landscapes ‘bother’ her for blurring ‘the thing seen’ with ‘the thing painted’61 and Botticellis are so realistic as to appear ‘artificial’.62 But how can artifice appear more artificial by recourse to the real? Stein explains,

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Once we get past Stein’s signature abstruseness, I  take it she means that the artwork loses its integrity as art if it tries too hard to be life-like. Velázquez and Courbet disturb Stein to no end for this reason. ‘The Velasquez [sic] bothered me as I say,’ Stein confesses, ‘because like the Cazins of my youth they were too real and yet they were not real enough to be real and not unreal enough to be unreal.’64 Courbet’s realism similarly induces anxiety for ‘detract[ing] from the reality of the oil painting as oil painting’.65 Courbet’s colours so vividly evoke nature that Stein almost mistakes ‘the Courbets not being an oil painting but being a piece of the country in miniature as seen in a diminishing glass’.66 Tensions between artistic representation and reality escalate as ‘Pictures’ continues. The root issue remains constant: what is the function and capacity of art? To gesture beyond itself, towards itself, or all the above? Stein’s growing faith that ‘it made no difference what an oil painting painted it always did and should look like an oil painting’,67 her penchant for Greco and Cézanne – both factors suggest she pursues art that practices (by default) the third option. Greco ‘excited’ her, because his ‘oil painting was pure it neither moved nor was still nor was it real’.68 Cézanne’s objects ‘were so entirely these things that they were not an oil painting and yet that is just what the Cezannes [sic] were they were an oil painting’.69 But Stein makes such breakthroughs only to retract them. After discussing Rosenthal, Millet, Seymour Hayden, Whistler, Zorn, Méryon, Japanese prints, Cazin, Daubigny, Rousseau, Corot, Shilling, Tintoretto, Giotto, Castagna, Botticelli, Mantegna, Rubens, Titian, Velázquez, Greco, Courbet, David, Scheffer, Greuze, Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Leonardo and Seurat, Stein shockingly states, ‘I realized as I had already found out very often that there is a relation between anything that is painted and the painting of it. And gradually I realized as I had found very often that that relation was so to speak nobody’s business.’70 Walker believes that like Cézanne whose ‘surface designs were conceived in an effort to create a perfect match between the concrete signifiers of painting and the empirical data of perception’,71 Stein ‘clearly acknowledges that her commitment to the reality of immediate experience was always matched by – if not mastered by – her intense awareness of the separate but equal reality of language’.72 One of Stein’s 1940 letters to Haas reinforces Walker’s reading by positing, to quote Stein directly, ‘the relation of Description to Imagination’73



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as one of interchangeability. ‘[T]‌here is no real separation of course not, even in dreams of course not,’74 Stein writes of the pair. Mediated by subjectivity, description involves some level of imagination. Imagination, in turn, is always imagination of something and therefore descriptive. But ‘Pictures’ counters such reciprocal logic, stranding us in a strange place, somewhere between empirical realism and an excessively ideal phenomenology. Three years later, the signifier–signified debate finds new form in Picasso, which pits the visual against the emotive, the literal against the abstract in describing the artist’s twentieth-century innovations. Half of the time, Stein recounts a Picasso who wholeheartedly adopts Ruskin’s ‘innocent eye’. ‘[W]‌ithout the aid of association or emotion’,75 Picasso documents what he sees in the most literal sense – distorted proportions, blurred margins and all. By doing so, he reminds Stein of an infant coming to terms with the visible world: A child sees the face of its mother, it sees it in a completely different way than other people see it, I  am not speaking of the spirit of the mother, but of the features and the whole face, the child sees it from very near, it is a large face for the eyes of a small one, it is certain the child for a little while only sees a part of the face of its mother, it knows one feature and not another, one side and not the other, and in his way Picasso knows faces as a child knows them and the head and the body. He was then commencing to try to express this consciousness.76

Drawing exactly what one sees at a given moment, it turns out, counterintuitively engenders a peculiar tableau, one lacking nicely rounded out figures and panoramas. Picasso’s cubism takes after Constable’s impressionism and Cézanne’s post-impressionism through such disassociative gestures, although Stein, given to poetic hyperbole, never articulates the matter thus. A cubism that only bothers with ‘visible things’77 – ‘not things felt, not things remembered not established in relations’78 – swings into expressionism, however, when Stein construes Picasso as one ‘who saw a reality that was not the vision of the nineteenth century, which was not a thing seen but felt, which was a thing that was not based upon nature but opposed to nature’.79 Such arbitrary reversals happen swiftly, almost without warning. From transcribing nature, unnatural forms come to the fore, as Stein situates the cubist imagination in a lessened ‘faith in what the eyes were seeing’ as well as ‘need that a picture exist in its frame’.80 Now, cubism circulates, for all intents and purposes, as a variant of Kandinskean abstraction, taking in stride science’s discovering unperceivable phenomena and art’s increasingly life-like achievements. It pushes to unearth something novel, something less obsessed with disclosing material reality, a philosophically and

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historically worn out venture, Stein intimates. Unlike Seurat, Courbet, Matisse and their contemporaries, Picasso abandons mere retinal sensations, according to Stein, for ‘things expressed’.81 A visual visionary morphs into a spiritual one. But why an art of interiors trumps that upholding exteriors, especially when all art invokes both, goes unanswered. *** Stein extends the internally unstable tradition of pure retinal sensations promoted by Poussin, Berkeley, Chardin, Ruskin, Courbet, Manet, Constable and, among others, Cézanne.82 (Even the realists and naturalists dreamt of recovering things in themselves. Courbet, for one, declares in an open letter to students entreating him to open a teaching studio: ‘Imagination in art consists in knowing how to find the most complete expression of an existing thing, but never in inventing or creating that thing itself.’83) While all literature remains mediated by culture – Stein herself even lets slip, ‘The creator in the arts is like all the rest of the people living he is sensitive to the changes in the way of living and his art is inevitably influenced by the way each generation is living’84 – she cannot resist rhetorically inflating the age-old quest to revitalize reality for the world-weary. Treating the mind as a mechanical device that records phenomenological data from a clean slate becomes a strategy by which Stein, as she phrases it, charges ‘the earth’ with a ‘splendor that it never has had’.85 Art bleeds into science, but science, Stein forgets, never escapes its subjective origins either. A portrait or scientific study reveals just as much about its artist or author as the subject in question. This chapter opened with a reflection on Stein’s philosophical ties to Picasso and Cézanne, taking Tender Buttons as a point of departure. Its focus subsequently shifted to Stein’s essay ‘Pictures’ and her character-sketch Picasso, which best encapsulate her ongoing ambivalence regarding the bridge between our inner and outer life. The questions Stein raises in her haste to develop a new type of visual and verbal portraiture were archetypal of the heroic age of modernism when writers and artists alike were haunted by ‘the real’. Their ambitions were certainly not new, nor did they fade with time. Howard Hodgkin’s 2017 exhibition, as broached in the general introduction to this volume, is one of the latest iterations of such anxieties.86 The anti-portrait is antithetical to classical portraiture without ceding the genre in its entirety. It is another e­ xercise – the most radical one yet – in testing the parameters of the medium. In Stein’s case, she taps into a centuries-old vein eager to portray our essence in ever more ‘authentic’ ways. Caught between an abstractionism that lays claim to the most



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sensuously immediate reality and a realism laden with artifice, her theory of seeing illuminates how slippery the notion of mimesis can be.

Notes 1 For a survey of how these movements, among others, revolutionized the traditional portrait, see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘Residual Resemblance: Three Notes on the Ends of Portraiture’, in Face-Off: The Portrait in Recent Art, ed. Melissa E. Feldman (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1994), pp. 53–4; Ernst van Alphen, ‘The Portrait’s Dispersal: Concepts of Representation and Subjectivity in Contemporary Portraiture’, in Portraiture: Facing the Subject, ed. Joanna Woodall (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 242–3; Jonathan Frederick Walz, ‘Portraiture “at the Service of the Mind”: American Modernism, Representation, and Subjectivity from the Armory Show to the Great Depression’, in This Is a Portrait If I Say So: Identity in American Art, 1912 to Today (New Haven and London: Bowdoin College Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2015), pp. 48–51; 32–3 of Michael Newman’s chapter in this volume. 2 Buchloh, ‘Residual Resemblance’, p. 53. 3 Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (London: Reaktion Books, 1991), pp. 149–51. 4 Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (London: Penguin Classics, 2001), p. 16. 5 Quoted in John Malcolm Brinnin, The Third Rose: Gertrude Stein and Her World (Boston: Little, Brown, 1959), p. 74. 6 Quoted in Michael J. Hoffman, Critical Essays on Gertrude Stein (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1986), pp. 27–8. 7 For examples of Stein-Picasso readings, see Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930 (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1936), pp. 237–56; David Antin, ‘Some Questions about Modernism’, Occident, 8 (1974), 6–39; Randa Dubnick, The Structure of Obscurity: Gertrude Stein, Language, and Cubism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984); L. T. Fitz, ‘Gertrude Stein and Picasso: The Language of Surfaces’, American Literature, 45 (1973), 228–37; Michael J. Hoffman, The Development of Abstraction in the Writing of Gertrude Stein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1965); Marjorie Perloff, ‘Poetry as Word-System: The Art of Gertrude Stein’, American Poetry Review, 8 (1979), 33–43; Marilyn Gaddis Rose, ‘Gertrude Stein and the Cubist Narrative’, Modern Fiction Studies, 22 (1977), 543–55; Stephen Scobie, ‘The Allure of Multiplicity: Metaphor and Metonymy in Cubism and Gertrude Stein’, in Gertrude Stein and the Making of Literature, ed. Shirley Neuman and Ira B. Nadel (Boston: Northeastern

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University Press, 1988), pp. 98–118; Wendy Steiner, Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture of Gertrude Stein (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978); Wylie Sypher, Rococo to Cubism in Art and Literature (New York: Vintage, 1960); and William Wasserstrom, ‘The Sursymamericubealsim of Gertrude Stein’, Twentieth-Century Literature, 21 (1975), 90–106. Antin and Perloff, in particular, considerably refine this verbal–visual parallel. 8 Gertrude Stein, ‘A Transatlantic Interview’, in A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1971), pp. 24–5. 9 Possibly reacting against ongoing accusations that her language remains merely haphazard sound-play, Stein often suggests that writers write with their eyes and painters paint with anything but. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, she clarifies, or is said to clarify through Toklas’s fastidiously crafted voice: ‘I feel with my eyes … I don’t hear a language, I hear tones and voice and rhythms, but with my eyes I see words and sentences’; Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Vintage, 1960), p. 70. Similarly, in ‘A Transatlantic Interview’, Stein maintains, I write with my eyes, not with my ears or mouth. I hate lecturing, because you begin to hear yourself talk, because sooner or later you hear your voice, and you do not hear what you say. You just hear what they hear you say. As a matter of fact, as a writer I write entirely with my eyes. The words as seen by my eyes are the important words, and the ears and mouth do not count. (p. 31) See also Gertrude Stein, Bee Time Vine and Other Pieces, 1913–1927 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), p. 44. Although language’s musicality inspires her, Stein publicly distances herself from sound-poetry due to her low regard for purely phonetic schemes. 10 Thornton Wilder, ‘Gertrude Stein Makes Sense’, ‘47: The Magazine of the Year, 1 (1947), 10–15; reproduced in Gertrude Stein, Ida A Novel, ed. Logan Esdale (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), pp. 286–7, 290. 11 E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (London: Phaidon, 1962), p. 314. 12 Catherine R. Stimpson, ‘Gertrude Stein: Humanism and Its Freaks’, Boundary, 2 (1984), 315. 13 Neil Schmitz, ‘Gertrude Stein as Post-Modernist: The Rhetoric of Tender Buttons’, Journal of Modern Literature, 3 (1974), 1206. 14 Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America (London: Virago, 1988), pp. 238, 246. 15 Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons, in Look at Me Now and Here I Am: Writings and Lectures, 1909–45, ed. Patricia Meyerowitz (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 163. 16 Stein, Tender Buttons, p. 196. 17 Stein, Tender Buttons, p. 195.



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18 Stein, ‘A Transatlantic Interview’, p. 15. Stein jointly owned a number of Cézannes during her lifetime, including the famous Madame Cézanne with a Fan (1881). For a brief survey regarding the Stein’s Cézanne collection, see John Rewald, Cézanne, the Steins, and Their Circle (London: Thames & Hudson, 1986). 19 For a comprehensive study of Cézanne’s trademark techniques, see Richard Shiff, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism: A Study of the Theory, Technique, and Critical Evaluation of Modern Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 20 See, for instance, John Rewald, Paul Cézanne: Letters (New York: Hacker Art, 1984). 21 Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Pages from the Goncourt Journal, ed. Robert Baldick (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 1188. 22 John Ruskin, The Elements of Drawing, ed. Bernard Dunstan (London: Herbert, 2006), p. 18. 23 Goncourt, Pages from the Goncourt Journal, p. 80. 24 Goncourt, Pages from the Goncourt Journal, p. 270. 25 Goncourt, Pages from the Goncourt Journal, p. xxi. 26 Goncourt, Pages from the Goncourt Journal, p. xxii. 27 See also Goncourt, Pages from the Goncourt Journal, pp. 101, 106–7, 324, 337, 357. 28 Goncourt, p. 285. 29 Tellingly, Cézanne himself once proclaims in a missive to his son, ‘[L]‌ong live the Goncourts, Pissarro, and all those who love colour, the representative of light and air’ (3 August 1906); Rewald, Paul Cézanne: Letters, p. 318. 30 Gertrude Stein, Picasso, in Writings, 1932–1946, ed. Catherine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman (New York: Library of America, 1998), pp. 504–5. 31 Cézanne in a letter to Bernard, 1905, unspecified day and month; Rewald, Paul Cézanne: Letters, p. 311. 32 Cézanne in a letter to Bernard, 23 October 1905; Rewald, Paul Cézanne: Letters, p. 313. 33 Stein, Picasso, p. 507. 34 Stein, Picasso, p. 508. 35 For more on this topic, see Harry R. Garvin, ‘The Human Mind & Tender Buttons’, in Gertrude Stein Advanced: An Anthology of Criticism, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (Jefferson: McFarland, 1990), pp. 85–8; Ariane Mildenberg, ‘Openings: Epoché as Aesthetic Tool in Modernist Texts’, in Phenomenology, Modernism and Beyond, ed. Carole Bourne-Taylor and Ariane Mildenberg (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), pp. 41–73; Ariane Mildenberg, ‘Seeing Fine Substances Strangely: Phenomenology in Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons’, Studia Phaenomenologica, 8 (2008), 259–82; and Peter Quartermain, Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 36 Stein, Picasso, p. 528. 37 Stein, Picasso, p. 509.

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38 Lyn Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p. 104. 39 See, for instance, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. David E. Linge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976); and Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962). 40 Realism and Tradition in Art, 1848–1900: Sources and Documents, ed. Linda Nochlin (Eaglewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966), p. 166. 41 Nochlin, Realism and Tradition in Art, 1848–1900, p. 168. 42 Goncourt, p. 40. 43 Goncourt, p. 266. 44 Goncourt, p. 335. 45 24 January 1904; Rewald, Paul Cézanne: Letters, p. 294. 46 See Shiff and Rewald, Paul Cézanne: Letters (endnotes) for commentary on how Bernard somewhat distorted Cézanne’s image into that of a symbolist mystic, incorrectly insinuating that Cézanne totally broke with impressionist ideals. Bernard projected many of his own aesthetic abstractions onto Cézanne, and it is his Cézanne that has largely been passed down to the modernists, notwithstanding Cézanne’s own reservations towards Bernard’s academic tone. 47 1905, unspecified day and month; Rewald, Paul Cézanne: Letters, p. 311. 48 Gombrich, Art and Illusion, p. 169. 49 For the most definitive exposé to date regarding photography’s intrinsically representational properties, see Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin, 2002). 50 Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, p. 62. 51 Mildenberg, ‘Openings: Epoché as Aesthetic Tool in Modernist Texts’, p. 50. 52 Mildenberg, ‘Openings: Epoché as Aesthetic Tool in Modernist Texts’, p. 64. 53 Stein, ‘A Transatlantic Interview’, pp. 15–16; quoted in Jayne L. Walker, The Making of a Modernist: Gertrude Stein from Three Lives to Tender Buttons (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), p. 13. 54 Stein, Tender Buttons, p. 168; quoted in Walker, The Making of a Modernist, p. 142. 55 Quoted in Robert Bartlett Haas’ unpaginated preface to Gertrude Stein, How Writing Is Written, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1974). 56 Stein, Lectures in America, p. 199. 57 Stein, Lectures in America, p. 61. 58 Stein, Lectures in America, p. 63. 59 Stein, Lectures in America, p. 80. 60 Stein, Lectures in America, p. 68. 61 Stein, Lectures in America, p. 69. 62 Stein, Lectures in America, p. 71.



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63 Stein, Lectures in America, p. 71. 64 Stein, Lectures in America, p. 73. 65 Stein, Lectures in America, p. 75. 66 Stein, Lectures in America, p. 75. 67 Stein, Lectures in America, p. 72. 68 Stein, Lectures in America, p. 73. 69 Stein, Lectures in America, p. 77. 70 Stein, Lectures in America, p. 79. 71 Walker, The Making of a Modernist, p. 13. 72 Walker, The Making of a Modernist, p. xiv. 73 Edward M. Burns and Ulla E. Dydo (eds), The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 402. 74 Burns and Dydo, The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, p. 402. 75 Stein, Picasso, p. 524. 76 Stein, Picasso, p. 507. 77 Stein, Picasso, p. 507. 78 Stein, Picasso, p. 522. 79 Stein, Picasso, pp. 519–20. 80 Stein, Picasso, p. 505. 81 Stein, Picasso, p. 497. 82 See, for instance, Moshe Barasch, Theories of Art, 3: From Impressionism to Kandinsky (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 11–78; Gombrich, Art and Illusion; Walker, The Making of a Modernist, pp. 1–18. 83 1861; quoted in Nochlin, Realism and Tradition in Art, 1848–1900, p. 35. 84 Stein, Picasso, p. 504. 85 Stein, Picasso, p. 533. 86 Howard Hodgkin: Absent Friends. National Portrait Gallery, London. 23 March to 18 June 2017.

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‘A whole man, made of all men’: Giacometti, existentialism and the ‘singular universal’ Véronique Wiesinger

In September 1945, Giacometti left Switzerland to return to his beloved Paris studio and embark on a series of heads which, contrary to the ones produced from 1935 on, were sculpted mainly from memory. These heads, male and female, captured in the studio by photographer Marc Vaux in 1946, are very precise renditions of a male or female individual  – even if it is impossible to pinpoint exactly who that person might be. Although these sculptures are untitled, viewers familiar with the history of the artist might be tempted to recognize his assistant brother Diego in the male figure, and in the female heads his war-estranged lover, the British painter Isabel Nicholas who Giacometti was expecting to return from London at that time.1 Later, Giacometti became aware of this temptation of recognition and of the taste of the public for psychology and anecdote, but declared several times that this was completely alien to his project.2 Cézanne, the painter Giacometti admired from childhood and studied all his life, reportedly said:  ‘As for me, I  hate that, all those stories, that psychology, that symbolism. … All the painter wanted is there. His psychology is in the way he makes two colors meet.’3 None of Cézanne’s portraits show any expression. Neither do Giacometti’s: as he told Jacques Dupin in 1965, Invisible Object was ‘the only sculpture where I  have tried to create expressive eyes, to give it an expression’.4 According to Cézanne: ‘One has to go beyond feeling, get past it, have the nerve to give it objective shape and be willing to put down squarely what one sees by sacrificing what one feels.’5 Giacometti concurred when he declared to Jean-Marie Drot in 1962:  For me, it is merely a question of trying to see how a head holds itself in space. Therefore, I do not think about the person’s interior or personality. Of course it

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Anti-Portraiture matters, but it cannot matter to me while I am working. It is only a question of putting things more or less in place. For me, the appearance and the core are one and the same, see? One could even say that the appearance is the core itself. … I am not interested in making beautiful sculptures or beautiful paintings, or in expressing my affectivity, my personality, through painting or through art. For me, art is simply a way of attempting to know how I see the exterior world. So for me, what counts is indeed the subject, isn’t it?6

Cézanne’s vision was for Giacometti the most subjective and the most objective possible, entirely divorced from his affective personality or his desires … he’s almost like a man of science. If others experience the sensation he wanted to convey, with their own subjectivity, and if several people experience the same sensation, it tends to become objective. There is something valid for several people if the subjective takes on an objective quality.7

Reality, for Giacometti, was on Cézanne’s side: ‘What interests me after all in all painting is resemblance, or what for me is resemblance: what uncovers a little more of the exterior world that I see.’8 In the mid-1930s, at about the same time as Giacometti embarked on representing a man (or woman)’s likeness exactly as he saw him (or her), that is, in the most objective subjective manner – a scientific record of the subjective human perception, not the mechanical objectivity of a photo camera – Jean-Paul Sartre was putting the finishing touches to L’Imagination, an essay to be published in 1936 and followed in 1940 by The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination. In the first of these texts, Sartre stresses the importance of the viewer as the one that will discriminate between ‘images’ of a specific person (the product of imagination, memories) and the perception of the person him/ herself (his/her physical presence). However, the art Giacometti produced after 1945 materialized what Sartre had described as two irreconcilable types of existence:  Giacometti’s representations of human beings blended both images and presence, and contained a multiplicity of contradictory perceptions and memories all the more powerful when they emanated from (or were projected on) neutral features. Giacometti’s composite portraits are anything but ‘pure presence’, be it in the physical sense of the term ‘presence’ or in Yves Bonnefoy’s metaphysical one.9 Sartre met Giacometti in 1941, but their intense dialogue, hugely profitable for both sides, started in earnest in 1946. In 1947, Sartre agreed to write the preface to the catalogue of Giacometti’s personal exhibition held at the Pierre



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Matisse Gallery in New  York, an essay titled ‘The Search for the Absolute’.10 The text, first published in English in 1948, is for the most part a new and ground-breaking interpretation of the work of Giacometti. In one of the paragraphs however, precisely the one in which Sartre describes the sculptures as ‘sensible expressions of a pure presence’, it is clear that the philosopher is trying to tack onto Giacometti’s art the key ideas from his previous essays on imagination, including the suppression of multiplicity in favour of unity and the indivisibility of the image appearing ‘totally and all at once’, in a ‘movement without duration’, an ‘instantaneous coming forth’.11 In the margin of one of the typescripts, Giacometti expressed his doubts.12 In any case, Sartre pinpointed rightly that the ‘Copernican revolution’ Giacometti had introduced in sculpture is that ‘he shows us men and women already seen. But not already seen by him alone.’13 In his second essay on the artist, published in French in May 1954, Jean-Paul Sartre noted that the viewer can interpret Giacometti’s portrait mood in various ways, as a mouth can successively appear harsh, bitter, ironic, open or stiff; each face is endlessly formed, deformed and reformed. Of each portrait, Sartre added: ‘while I cannot see it otherwise than as I do, I know that others will see it differently’.14 The living, ‘hallucinatory’ character of Giacometti’s figures made a great impression on Sartre, who used this term and that of ‘apparition’ several times in his 1954 text – terms he had used in his early essays to describe the power of imagination. According to Sartre, Giacometti’s figures were blurred, indistinct and only became visible through the viewer’s sustained interaction with them. This indeterminate character is particularly visible in the series of dark portraits that Giacometti painted from 1951 on. Titled Tête noire (‘Dark portrait’),15 the works depict grey-skinned male faces whose features are devoid of specific characteristics, at times even indistinct, set within an indefinite space saturated with various hues of grey. At once sculptural and ghostly, these halo-ringed figures seem to emerge from a kind of magma. They call to mind the sensation that the artist has ‘often felt in front of living beings, above all in front of human heads, the sense of a space-atmosphere which immediately surrounds the beings, penetrates them, is already the being itself: the exact limits, the dimensions of this being become indefinable’.16 About the man that appears in glimpses in these grey-on-grey portraits, Sartre wrote in 1954, ‘Nothing enfolds him, nothing supports him, nothing contains him: he appears, isolated in the immense frame of the void. … The painted personage is hallucinatory, for he presents himself in the form of a questioning apparition.’17 Playing like an illusionist with the expectations of our perception, Giacometti produces ‘simulacra which, while

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standing for what they really are, arouse in us the feelings and attitudes that a meeting with real men ordinarily inspires’.18 In December 1950, the dealer Pierre Matisse wrote about the gripping effect Giacometti’s works had on him:  ‘It is a blinding reality. As if you suddenly stumbled upon yourself face to face around a street corner – and it is naturally so lifelike that the revelation is a shock that is hard to accept. Man sees himself as if in a mirror, and what mirror! Before feeling any reprieve, one must reconcile oneself to oneself.’19 This cathartic and emancipating experience is the strongest for those who, like Jean Genet (as well as Pierre Matisse, precisely in 1950), not only contemplate the works at length but spend time on the Giacomettian ‘couch’ (in the form of a rather stiff wicker chair) for long posing sessions during which they fix their gaze upon the master and progressively experience a transfer of themselves into the work, as it is made and unmade in sculpture or painting under the master’s hands.20 Genet described his confusion at looking at one of his portraits outside the studio:  ‘I identify myself as being as much in the painting as face to face with it, looking at it.’21 Paola Caròla, who posed for Giacometti in 1958 and, like Giacometti, was close to the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, has described the profound connection between Giacometti’s singular universal and self-revelation:  Even though Alberto Giacometti asserted that he made no distinction between one model and another … I can assure you that my collaboration with him had a singular and entirely personal effect on me:  that of setting in motion vital mechanisms that were likely dormant or weakened … of giving me access to buried memories and feelings that, once they were brought up to the surface, I was able to elaborate.22 At the end of our posing sessions, I had recognized myself, I had recovered my inner core.23

Genet started posing for Giacometti on 1 September 1954, the date inscribed on one of the six known drawings of Genet. In his famous text first published in June 1957, ‘The Studio of Alberto Giacometti’,24 Genet wrote that he had been seeing Giacometti regularly for four years, pointing to 1953 as the date of their first meeting.25 It is also precisely the date commonly ascribed to Genet’s ‘crucial experience’ (to use his biographer Edmund White’s expression)26 during a train journey, which he also recounts in the text on Giacometti’s studio. The fact that this experience took the form of a face-to-face encounter in a closed compartment is significant. Seated across from a stranger, Genet had the revelation that ‘any man was exactly – sorry, but I want to emphasize “exactly” – “worth” any other



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man. … Giacometti has seen this for many years and restores it to us.’27 To claim that any man is worth any other is to possess the antidote to solitude, and the certitude to blend in with the crowd of humanity. This liberating idea, at the heart of Giacometti’s thought, returns in extremis to conclude Sartre’s The Words: ‘a whole man, made of all men, worth all of them and any one of them worth him’,28 a formulation added in 1963, the very year of the republication of Genet’s text on Giacometti. Genet returned to the train episode again as late as 1967 and elaborated on the revelation that ‘every man is every other man, and I as much as the others’ – this time eliminating the reference to Giacometti.29 The notion that anyone who posed for him resembled, merged with and was worth all the others, however, was one that Giacometti had long and often expressed.30 In 1961, Pierre Schneider asked him, ‘This face that you are looking for, which is behind any particular face, isn’t it general to the point of being abstract?’ To which Giacometti replied:  ‘Oh no! Absolutely the opposite. The more it is you, the more you become anyone else … But you are the others only inasmuch as you are most yourself, aren’t you? You reach the general, as it were, only through the most particular.’31 Walking Man, in the two versions completed in 1960, is a representation of this ‘singular universal’, to use the concept that Sartre developed after the war and coined in 1964.32 The artist’s subjective expression becomes anyone’s expression. Walking Man stands on the same level and at the same scale as the viewer and moves forward, his face impassible, his back absolutely straight, with a density and a force that belie his thin physical frame. At once strange and familiar, he is not here to ravish the dead or keep watch over them (as Genet wrote in 1957 about the Women of Venice), but walks among the living, like one of them. Genet wrote about him in 1957: ‘The walking man, threadlike. His curved foot. He’ll never stop. And he walks well and truly on the earth, that’s to say on a sphere.’33 The sculpture of a walking silhouette with generic features appears in Giacometti’s preserved work in 1946, on the occasion of a commission for a monument to Gabriel Péri, a communist and resistant gunned down by the Nazis (the monument remained at the stage of a model).34 Between 1947 and 1950, Giacometti made numerous variants of walking men, alone or in groups, most of them small, except for the first life-size Walking Man (1947, Kunsthaus Zürich). This bronze, which remained unique, went directly to the United States; hence in 1957 Genet could only have seen it on a photograph. Could the sculpture Genet describes be one of the bronze editions of the two versions of Three Men Walking? Or one of the two versions of City Square, whose casting began in 1948? Or one of the two different sculptures of a single man walking on

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a long flat plane: Walking Quickly Under the Rain (whose editions started being produced in 1948), and Man Crossing a Square on a Sunny Morning (1950)? The theme of the walking man disappeared in Giacometti’s work after 1950, until an American commission prompted him to return to it. In December 1958, the artist was selected with Alexander Calder to participate in a limited competition for a sculpture to be installed in front of the new Chase Manhattan Bank building designed by the architect Gordon Bunshaft in New York’s Wall Street district. Giacometti agreed to participate on 17 January 1959 and received a model of the site from the architect, but only began work on the piece in April, after considering a trip to New York to take the full measure of the site. He worked tirelessly for the following five months on a group of three isolated sculptures: a giant woman, a monumental generic male head and a tall walking man. In September 1959, however, Giacometti announced that he wasn’t ready to participate in the selecting exhibition scheduled in New York in October. He eventually abandoned the project in July 1960, despite having sent several pieces for casting, including the two life-size versions of Walking Man. This sculpture with indistinct features became an instant icon of man in the twentieth century, the portrait of ‘the faceless man of the masses’, of ‘the faceless and anonymous hero, who is at once everyman and nobody’, to use the phrases coined in 1958 by William Barrett in what was soon to become the standard handbook in the United States on existentialism, Irrational Man:  A Study in Existential Philosophy.35 In 1962, for the paperback edition of the book, Walking Man graced the cover. Another sculpture by Giacometti, of a generic female figure, had already been chosen for the cover of the catalogue of the epochal exhibition organized in 1959 by Peter Selz for The Museum of Modern Art in New York, called New Images of Man. In a prefatory note to the catalogue, Paul Tillich writes, One needs only look at the dehumanizing structure of the totalitarian systems in one half of the world, and the dehumanizing consequences of technical mass civilization in the other half. In addition, the conflict between them may lead to the annihilation of humanity. … The first group resigns itself to becoming things amongst things, giving up its individual self. The second group tries desperately to resist this danger.36

Because Giacometti’s project had nothing to do with portraiture in the classical sense, it was open to all interpretations. It restored the singular through the universal, as Genet summed it up: ‘the kinship between his figures seems to me to be that precious point where a human being is reduced to his most irreducible essence: the solitude of being exactly equivalent to any other’.37



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In 1963, Giacometti told Pierre Dumayet: I no longer recognize people after seeing them so much. [Diego, my brother] has posed for me ten thousand times; when he poses I no longer recognize him. I  want to make him pose so that I  can see what I  see. When my wife poses for me, after three days she no longer looks like herself. I no longer recognize her at all. … When I make a head from memory, people tell me: ‘It’s Diego.’ As for me, I don’t know. I am about the only one to make busts – of my wife, my brother  – after life. The people who buy them are usually modern art lovers. They don’t buy a bust because it resembles the model; they buy it because they think it is entirely invented. … And at the same time, I think they are deceiving themselves. I think that what interests them, in spite of themselves, even if they don’t want to admit it, is that small degree of resemblance.38

Thirty years after experiencing Breton’s real or imagined lack of understanding for his research on human heads, Giacometti had to confront another misconception: the reduction of his project to that of the portrait and its accompanying art-historical conventions. The painted and sculpted busts and figures bear witness to Giacometti’s ever-renewed attempt to translate through the gaze the complexity of our relationships to others. By endlessly scrutinizing Annette and Diego, Giacometti resituated in each the unconquerable foreignness of an absolute Other, at once close and out of reach, equivalent to all and yet without equal. In fact, many figures made after specific models like Annette or Diego were given generic titles such as Standing Nude or Head of a Man. When Giacometti worked from memory, a transversal image of his most frequent models, sometimes containing both male and female features, appeared under his fingers (sculpture) or his brush (painting). Some Standing Women made from memory in the late 1950s have hairless heads that combine Annette and Diego’s features.39 This is why grouping Giacometti’s works for display according to the identity of sitters, as Paul Moorhouse did at the National Portrait Gallery in 2015, is to my mind irrelevant and misleading.40 Six drawings (three dated September 1954 and two dated 1957)  and three paintings remain of Jean Genet’s passage in Giacometti’s life. Two paintings are not dated, but are probably from 1955, and the third is dated 1957. Genet’s writings are another remnant of their friendship. Genet arrived at the studio in 1954, in the grip of creative impotence and isolation since 1949,41 and went on to produce a number of masterpieces in rapid succession after 1955. The painted portrait now belonging to the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the most monumental

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despite its modest dimensions, was executed just before this creative burst. Genet, depicted in his light grey suit, appears like a massive, broad-shouldered body, awkwardly tangled in the spiral-shaped strokes that tie his hands together.42 This mass is surmounted by a tiny head  – like a pebble or a Jivaro head  – crossed by a prominent eyebrow blocking his gaze. His head, lined unlike the rest with skeins of pulsating colour, seems about to explode, recalling Giacometti’s remark to his Japanese model and friend Isaku Yanaihara43 in 1956:  ‘Your face on the canvas seemed to me like a bomb that could go off at the slightest touch and that was going to ruin everything.’44 Recent authors have seen in this portrait an echo of the Louvre’s Seated Scribe (Old Kingdom Egypt);45 but the scribe is poised and serene, his appearance spare, his mien affable and his (glass) eyes open wide, whereas Genet is depicted here in all his disquiet, tetanized, his hands knotted into a nervous mass, his head moving as far away as possible from the painter. ‘I have the impression – as when hair is pulled back from the brow and the temples – that the painter pulls back (behind the canvas) the meaning of the face’, Genet wrote.46 For Giacometti, the revolution Cézanne initiated went much beyond the invention of a new way of painting. In 1957, he declared: It is as if Cézanne had exploded a bomb in the prevailing vision when he painted a head as if it were an object – and he would claim as much, he would say: ‘I paint a head like an apple, like anything else.’ … any [re]presentation seeking today to return to the previous vision, to the integrity of a head as they were painted in the Renaissance, will fail: it just doesn’t work anymore. It no longer looks like a head, it looks like a museum head.47

What Giacometti came to call a ‘museum head’ is a conventional artwork devoid of life. He made abundantly clear in several interviews from 1950 onwards that We are the victims of a deceptive heritage. The Greco-Roman tradition is heralded as the veritable mirror of life. At school, students copy busts of Socrates or the Voltaire by Houdon and believe it is the truth, it is nature. Whereas it is merely the very specific vision of our civilization. Nothing is more arbitrary than the Greek canon. I look at you, you talk to me: your head is much more important to me than your legs. … The same for a Roman portrait bust: what is more fake than this little cold thing that you can revolve around? In a real human figure, the face commands and holds your attention.48

For Giacometti, the essential difference between a corpse and a living person could be located in the gaze:



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One wants to sculpt a living being, however in the living being there is no doubt that what makes it living is the gaze. This leads me to the sculptures of New Hebrides and to Egyptian sculpture. The sculpture of New Hebrides is true, and more than true, because it has a gaze. On the contrary, Greek sculpture has no gaze.49

Giacometti often lamented that ‘Everyone believes they know what a head in sculpture is, but everyone sees a Greco-Roman bust instead of a head’,50 whereas to him ‘Anyone of us look more like an Egyptian sculpture than any other sculpture ever done. The same applies to exotic art, such as Oceanian or African sculpture. … I like a sculpture from New Guinea because I find it more resemblant to anyone, to you or to me, than a Greco-Roman head or a conventional head.’51 In African or Egyptian art in particular, Giacometti’s found a kindred effort to sculpt or paint not a ‘museum head’ but a figure imbued with the same powers as the living. According to him, the Egyptians ‘reproduced as faithfully as possible their vision of the real. To them, it was a religious necessity. Their aim was to create doubles as close to the living being as they could. There is a text, a kind of poem, where sculptures are described as so real that they can frighten those who see them.’52 Indeed Giacometti pursued relentlessly the ambition to create such a double, in his case the living portrait of ‘every man’. As the poet Francis Ponge jotted on 4 September 1951 as a note for the essay he was about to publish on Giacometti in the journal Cahiers d’Art: The Any Given Man that I am: This is what Giacometti has the nerve to offer us in sculpture. He is the sculptor of the personal pronoun (of the first-person singular). The I so definitive, so indifferent, the I that cannot die as it will always be used as a personal pronoun by somebody, the I that cannot be looked at from a distance, the hazy and thin apparition at the head of most of our sentences: that is what Giacometti wants to sculpt, what he pretends to make stand on its long leg (I).53 [Paris, 2015]

Notes This chapter draws on ideas already broached in several essays by the author, in particular: Véronique Wiesinger, ‘The Women of Giacometti’, in The Women of Giacometti, ed. Louise Tolliver Deutschman, trans. Anthony Allen

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(New York: PaceWildenstein, 2005); Véronique Wiesinger, ‘A Head like an Apple, like Anything Else’, in Cézanne & Giacometti: Paths of Doubt, ed. Felix A. Baumann and Poul Erik Tøjner, trans. Anthony Allen (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2008); and Véronique Wiesinger, ‘Isabel and Other Intimate Strangers’, in Isabel and Other Intimate Strangers: Alberto Giacometti, Francis Bacon, trans. Anthony Allen (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2008). 1 On Isabel Nicholas and Alberto Giacometti see Véronique Wiesinger, Alberto Giacometti, Isabel Nicholas, Correspondances (Lyon and Paris: Fage Éditions & Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, 2007); Wiesinger, ‘Isabel and Other Intimate Strangers’; and Véronique Wiesinger, ‘Alberto Giacometti and Jean Genet: “Every Man Is Every Other Man, and I as Much as the Others”’, in Keys to a Passion, ed. Suzanne Pagé and Béatrice Parent (Paris: Fondation Louis Vuitton, 2015). 2 For example, see his interview with Pierre Dumayet in 1963: Pierre Dumayet, ‘Le Drame D’un Réducteur de Tête’, Le Nouveau Candide, 110 (1963), 9. 3 Reported by Joachim Gasquet, 1921: for an English translation see Joachim Gasquet, Joachim Gasquet’s Cézanne: A Memoir with Conversations, trans. Christopher Pemberton (London: Thames & Hudson, 1991), p. 185; the translation published here amends the 1991 one. 4 Alberto Giacometti, Interview with Jacques Dupin filmed by Ernst Scheidegger and Peter Münger, 1965. 5 Gasquet, Joachim Gasquet’s Cézanne, p. 213. 6 Alberto Giacometti, in Alberto Giacometti: un homme parmi les autres, director Jean-Marie Drot (Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française, 1963). 7 Alberto Giacometti, interview with Georges Charbonnier, recorded 28 October 1950, and broadcast on RTF on 16 April 1957, Archives of the Institut National de L’Audiovisuel (INA), Paris; published in an edited version in Georges Charbonnier, Le Monologue Du Peintre (Paris: Julliard, 1959), pp. 171–83. 8 Alberto Giacometti, interview with Georges Charbonnier, see footnote above. 9 Yves Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti: A Biography of His Work (Paris: Flammarion, 2012); ‘Pure Presence’ was also the title chosen by Paul Moorhouse for an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2015; Paul Moorhouse, Giacometti: Pure Presence (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2015). 10 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘The Search for the Absolute’, in Alberto Giacometti, ex. cat. (New York: Pierre Matisse Gallery, 1948). 11 Sartre, ‘The Search for the Absolute’, p. 14. 12 Unpublished typescript, Archives of the Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris Two typescripts exist, the other one is at the Morgan Museum and Library in New York in the Pierre Matisse Gallery Archives (MO 5020). The annotations on



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the Paris typescript make clear that the essay was partly based on a letter written to Sartre by Giacometti about his work, a letter that is unlocated at the moment. 13 Sartre, ‘The Search for the Absolute’. 14 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘The Paintings of Giacometti’, in Art and Artist, trans. Warren Ramsey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), pp. 179–94 (191); the first English translation of this essay was published as ‘Giacometti in Search of Space’, trans. Lionel Abel, Art News, September 1955. 15 The first instances of this title, in French, German and English, occur as follows: as ‘Tête Noire’, cat. no. 47, in Malerei in Paris Heute, ex. cat. (Zurich: Kunsthaus Zurich, 1952); as ‘Schwarzes Porträts’, cat. no. 2, in Giacometti, ex. cat. (Krefeld and Düsseldorf: Kaiser-Wilhelm Museum and Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, 1955); and as ‘Dark Portrait’ (not numbered), in Alberto Giacometti, ex. cat. (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1955). 16 Alberto Giacometti, ‘Un sculpteur vu par un sculpteur: Henri Laurens’, Labyrinthe, 4 (1945), 3. 17 Sartre, ‘The Paintings of Giacometti’; the emphasis on ‘appears’ and ‘enquiring apparition’ is in the French original. 18 Sartre, ‘The Paintings of Giacometti’, p. 193. 19 Pierre Matisse, Letter of 12 December 1960, Archives of the Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris. 20 Such experiences of identification are described by James Lord, A Giacometti Portrait (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1965), pp. 22–4; and Paola Caròla, Monsieur Giacometti, je voudrais vous commander mon buste (Paris: Editions Léo Scheer, 2008), pp. 60–2, 91–2. 21 Jean Genet, The Studio of Alberto Giacometti, trans. Phil King (London: Grey Tiger Books, 2013), p. 62. 22 Caròla, Monsieur Giacometti, je voudrais vous commander mon buste, pp. 52–3. 23 Caròla, Monsieur Giacometti, je voudrais vous commander mon buste, p. 92. 24 Unless otherwise indicated, the English translation used in this essay is Genet, The Studio of Alberto Giacometti, trans. Phil King (London: Grey Tiger Books, 2013). The first version of ‘L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti’ was initially published in excerpts in the review Derrière le Miroir, no. 98, June 1957, and later in its entirety in Les Lettres nouvelles, no. 52, September 1957, pp. 199–218. The second version, which contains important additions (notably the first paragraphs), was first published in 1958 in a collection titled L’Atelier de Giacometti, Les Bonnes (suivi d’une lettre), L’Enfant criminel, Le Funambule by L’Arbalète (Décines), then published for the first time in a separate volume in 1962, in German (in Marlis Portner’s translation), by Verlag Ernst Scheidegger (Zurich). The volume was illustrated with photographs by Scheidegger. The Giacometti Foundation (Paris) has acquired manuscripts related to the 1957 version in a public sale (2013–33 and 2013–34).

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25 ‘In the four years that I have regularly visited him’, Genet, The Studio of Alberto Giacometti, p. 17. 26 Edmund White, Genet (London: Vintage, 2004), p. 460. 27 Genet, The Studio of Alberto Giacometti. 28 Jean-Paul Sartre, Words, trans. Irene Clephane (London: Penguin and Hamish Hamilton, 2000), p. 158. 29 Jean Genet, ‘What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn into Four Equal Pieces and Flushed Down the Toilet’, in Rembrandt, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Hanuman Books, 1988), p. 32. French original published in Tel Quel, no. 29, 1967. Genet’s reflection on Rembrandt was prompted by Giacometti, who included the Dutch artist in his personal pantheon and made copies of his work in drawings. 30 See, for example, Dumayet, ‘Le Drame D’un Réducteur de Tête’, p. 9; reprinted in Alberto Giacometti, Ecrits, Articles, Notes et Entretiens (Paris: Hermann, 2008) in particular pp. 307–8. 31 Pierre Schneider, ‘Ma longue marche par Alberto Giacometti’, L’Express, no. 521, 8 June 1961; reprinted in Alberto Giacometti, Ecrits, Articles, Notes et Entretiens, p. 230. 32 According to Jean-François Louette, ‘Les Mots: écrire l’universel singulier’, in Pourquoi et Comment Sartre a Écrit Les Mots, ed. Michel Contat (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1966), p. 372. 33 Genet, The Studio of Alberto Giacometti, p. 52. 34 For more on The Night, see Véronique Wiesinger, The Studio of Alberto Giacometti. Collections of the Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2007), pp. 133–7; Casimiro di Crescenzo has identified the partial tiny silhouette of a figure walking and brandishing a flag on a picture of the studio taken by Dora Maar in the 1930s as the only overt political sculpture by the artist. Casimiro di Crescenzo, ‘Giacometti artista e rivoluzionario’, in Alberto Giacometti, ed. JeanLouis Prat and Claudio Spadoni, ex. cat. (Ravenna: Mazzotta, 2004), pp. 47–57. 35 William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Anchor, 1962), pp. 9, 61–2. 36 Paul Tillich, ‘Each Period Has Its Peculiar Image of Man’, in New Images of Man, ed. Peter Selz, ex. cat. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1959), pp. 9–10. 37 Genet, The Studio of Alberto Giacometti. 38 Dumayet, ‘Le Drame D’un Réducteur de Tête’, p. 9. 39 This might explain the anecdote reported by James Lord in his wildly inaccurate and fantasized biography of the artist, according to which Giacometti would ask Annette to shave her head. James Lord, Giacometti: A Biography (London: Phoenix, 1996), p. 365.



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40 Paul Moorhouse, Giacometti: Pure Presence (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2015). 41 White describes the years 1949–55 as a ‘seven-year depression and silence’; White, Genet, p. xl. 42 For Genet’s portrait, Giacometti returned to the device of spiral lines that seem to tie up the sitter, a practice he had abandoned in 1952. 43 Isaku Yanaihara, a professer of philosophy at the University of Osaka, introduced Sartre to Japan and translated his work into Japanese. 44 This quote was published in Japanese in 1969 and translated into French by Sachiko Natsume-Dube, Giacometti et Yanaihara: La Catastrophe de Novembre 1956 (Paris: L’Echoppe, 1969), p. 18 (English translation from the French quote). 45 Thierry Dufrêne, Giacometti-Genet: Masques et Portrait Moderne (Paris: L’Insolite, 2006); and Thomas Augais, ‘Trait Pour Trait: Alberto Giacometti et les écrivains par voltes et faces d’ateliers’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Université Lumière Lyon 2, 2009). 46 Genet, The Studio of Alberto Giacometti, p. 52. 47 Alberto Giacometti, ‘Interview with Georges Charbonnier’ (Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, Paris); in the version of this radio interview published by Charbonnier in 1959, the quote is mistakenly transcribed as ‘I paint a head like a door, like anything else’, probably a confusion between ‘pomme’ (apple) and ‘porte’ (door). 48 Jean Clay, ‘Alberto Giacometti. Le long dialogue avec la mort d’un très grand sculpteur de notre temps’, Réalités, 215 (1963); reprinted in Ecrits, Articles, Notes et Entretiens, p. 314. 49 Alberto Giacometti, ‘Interview with Georges Charbonnier’. 50 Alain Jouffroy, ‘Portrait d’un artiste (VIII). Giacometti’, Arts, 7–13 (1955), 9; reprinted in Alberto Giacometti, Ecrits, Articles, Notes et Entretiens, p. 271. 51 Pierre Schneider, ‘Au Louvre avec Giacometti’, Preuves, 1962, 23–30; reprinted in Alberto Giacometti, Ecrits, Articles, Notes et Entretiens, p. 271. 52 Schneider, op. cit., in Alberto Giacometti, Ecrits, Articles, Notes et Entretiens, p. 271. 53 Francis Ponge, ‘Joca Seria. Notes sur les sculptures d’Alberto Giacometti’, Mediations, 7 (1964), 44–5. Translation of the author.

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‘Closeness, or the appearance of closeness’: Robert Morris’s critical self-portraits and the expanding artworld of 1960s America David Hodge

In 1964 the American artist Robert Morris made a relief sculpture called Scale with Hand. This consists of a lead sheet, wrapped over a wooden board, with two handprints placed symmetrically across its top and a small metal scale descending from a hook on its front. There is a rectangular panel hanging from the end of the scale, which contains a plaster cast of a hand, with its extended index finger pointing to the viewer’s left. Between them, these elements coalesce into a crudely indicated face, with the handprints as eyes, the scale as a nose and the plaster cast forming a mouth. This deliberately rudimentary, almost child-like attempt at representation feels like a visual joke, especially against the broader context of Morris’s practice from this period, which included many pointedly unusual ‘self-portraits’, that significantly depart from the logic of visual resemblance. Like Scale with Hand, a considerable number of Morris’s works from the first half of the 1960s feature handprints, footprints and other material traces of the artist’s body. I  contend that all of these pieces should be understood as self-portraits, albeit of a highly unusual kind. In the Western tradition, portraits have usually operated through iconic resemblance, that is, by ‘looking like’ somebody. Such visual representation seems to be parodied in Scale with Hand, by Morris’s ‘naive’ depiction of a face.1 At the same time, this work also signifies indexically. As the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce has explained, the index is a type of sign, which establishes a ‘real’ and ‘necessary’ connection with whatever it signifies.2 Though indexes come in several varieties, one classic example is the handprint or footprint. These signify hands and feet simply by marking a place that such objects have actually touched.3 As well as featuring

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such indexical signs, Scale with Hand also stresses the status of the index as a distinctly direct, even physical mode of signification. Through its rounded and uneven surface the plaster cast tangibly marks the physical impact of Morris’s body, inviting a desire to touch and thus eliciting a feeling of intimate corporeal proximity. Scale with Hand also features another kind of indexical sign. As well as hand and footprints, Peirce also used the pointing finger as an example of the index. This sign indicates something merely by gesturing towards it. The finger extending from the cast of Morris’s hand is clearly an index of this kind. However, unlike in Peirce’s example, it seems not to point at anything in particular. Each time the work is exhibited in a new space the finger will inevitably gesture towards something different. Consequently, rather than denoting a specific object, this finger primarily foregrounds the ambiguous structure of indexical signification itself, which is simultaneously empty and full. As Mary Ann Doane notes, since indexes seem to have an unusually direct relationship with their denoted objects, they can appear as ‘brute opaque fact[s]‌’ that ‘harbor a fullness, an excessiveness of detail’. On the other hand, however, because they ‘have no cognitive value, but simply indicate that something is “there” ’, they also carry ‘an emptiness, a hollowness’.4 As Peirce wrote with regard to the pointing finger, indexes always signify some object without actually telling us anything about it. The index ‘takes hold of our eyes, as it were, and forcibly directs them to a particular object … [but] only says “There!”, and there it stops’.5 Morris exemplified this dual dynamic in Scale with Hand, both through the pointing finger and the bodily prints. The latter insist that Morris has made physical contact with the work, but they provide very little information about him as an individual, or even his general appearance. The feeling of ‘emptiness’ that accompanies this realization is emphasized by the work’s impassive grey surface, the obstinate neutrality of which sits awkwardly alongside the prints’ suggestion of a corporeal presence. While Morris’s bodily indexes might initially seem to offer the frisson of direct contact with an artist’s touch, the work ultimately frustrates this desire, holding the viewer at a distance. This chapter focusses on Morris’s self-portraits of the early 1960s. While not all of these focus on indexicality, they do all share a certain dynamic, which is well exemplified by Scale with Hand. When encountering any of these pieces, the viewer is initially invited into an intimate encounter with the artist’s body, but this always eventually gives way to an equally powerful sense of distance and alienation. A  desire for closeness to the artist’s corporeal presence is aroused, before subsequently being rebuffed.



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We can find another example of this in a work called Portrait (1963), which comprises a wooden frame holding a series of grey, painted bottles, each in its own niche. The bottles are all labelled with the names of bodily substances  – ‘BLOOD’, ‘SWEAT’, ‘SPERM’, ‘SALIVA’, ‘PHLEGM’, ‘TEARS’, ‘URINE’ and ‘FECES’ – implying that these visceral materials are held inside the containers. Furthermore, since this work was made by Morris, viewers might be led to imagine that the fluids are his. Consequently, Portrait seems to offer a particularly close encounter with the artist’s body in perhaps its most basely carnal form. However, any such experience is resolutely denied by the bottles’ opaque surfaces, which stop us from seeing inside. This arouses our curiosity even further, making us want to get closer to the containers’ interiors and find out more about their contents. Most of all, we are drawn into wondering whether or not there are really bodily fluids inside these bottles, but again the work closes this question down as soon as it is provoked. Moreover, the bottles’ highly clinical presentation in a neatly ordered display case further emphasizes our distance from Morris, highlighting a significant degree of mediation between the deeply carnal acts of bleeding, urinating and ejaculating and the retrospective process of composing these substances into a neat, hygienic array. Rather than being close to the artist, it seems that we are separated from him by a series of intervening acts. The key issue in this chapter is to consider why Morris’s self-portraits from the early 1960s continually invite a desire for close contact with the artist’s body, only to deny access and leave the viewer at a distance. While this question has never specifically been framed with regard to the genre of self-portraiture before, other critics have observed similar traits within Morris’s practice of the period. In particular, commentators have often noted that many of his works play with the complicated dynamics of inside and outside, as in Portrait, which seems to offer a route into the artist’s ‘interior’ but leaves the viewer with nothing but a blank outer surface. In Rosalind Krauss’s writing on Morris, she has argued that this aspect of his practice involves a kind of philosophical critique, which undermines the idealist notion that the human subject is characterized by ‘selfcontainment’ or ‘autonomy’ from phenomenal and social spheres.6 According to Krauss, Morris’s use of corporeal imprints was designed as a ‘way to capture [the body’s] surfacing into external space’.7 In other words, she claims that he was using the subject’s physicality to deny it any interiority or separateness from the intersubjective realm. Although Krauss has never discussed it in print herself, we could perhaps extend her reading by viewing Portrait as a parody of the idea that the subject somehow lies ‘inside’ the body. The only interior offered

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here is one filled with viscera and fluids, rather than the idealized domain of metaphysical selfhood.8 Krauss’s reading is just one of numerous interpretations which claim that Morris’s art is best understood as a reflection on philosophical questions regarding the nature of subjectivity.9 While such readings offer important insight into Morris’s thinking, this chapter will take an alternative approach, grounding these works within the social history of art. Indeed, I contend that if we want to take critical notions like ‘anti-portraiture’ seriously, we always need to consider philosophical musings in relation to social history. As the historical materialist tradition has taught us, rather than existing in their own transcendent realm, thoughts always emerge from within historically specific contexts. These contemporaneous determinants are what lend ideas political significance. When viewed contextually, modes of thought are inseparable from social consequences, but when taken alone they risk being hollowed out, becoming mere shadows of their initial impetus. So, what was the historical significance of Morris’s peculiar play with the presence or absence of the artist’s body in self-portraiture? This chapter argues that his self-portraits of the early 1960s were critically engaged with a very specific function played by portraits in the American artworld at that time. On the one hand, this was a period when images of artists were appearing in the mass media more than ever before, offering the illusion of access to their working environments. On the other hand, however, the very same process of avant-garde art’s broad dissemination through the mass media meant that the relationship between artist and viewer was actually much more distanced and mediated than at any prior point in history. The dynamic of invitation and alienation invoked by Morris’s self-portraits thus seems designed to reveal the reality of spectators’ engagement with the figure of the artist in the early 1960s. Works like Portrait draw attention to both the unrealized desire of proximity to its producer and the mediation and administration underlying aesthetic experience in post-war America. They thereby foreground the crucial ideological role that portraits of artists played in both masking and reproducing an expanding artworld. So, while they may well open onto philosophical questions about the nature of the subject, I will argue that Morris’s self-portraits were prompted by historicallyspecific social concerns regarding art’s position in the world. Before proceeding to this argument, it is worth stressing one general point about what it might mean to talk about ‘anti-portraits’. Portraiture is a historically mutable genre, not only because its aesthetic conventions vary in different contexts but also because a single set of stylistic characteristics can



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play completely divergent roles within different social conditions. For example, I will argue that the key reference point for understanding Morris’s portraits is the changing significance that images of artists held in this period. However, these changes were not necessarily stylistic or theoretical – portraits of artists did not look significantly different than they had before and the assumptions made about them had not altered considerably either. Instead, it was the context they were operating within that lent them fresh importance. These images came to play a new function within the dissemination and display of avant-garde art and so it is their social significance which is at stake here, above and beyond anything else. I suggest that for any work of portraiture to be viewed as an ‘anti-portrait’ in a meaningful sense, it is not enough for it simply to attack aesthetic categories or even philosophical ones. Instead, an ‘anti-portrait’ must hone in on the specific social, institutional or economic significance that portraiture holds at any given time. In other words, it must critically examine and (if necessary) undermine the practical significance that portraits hold within the world. This is what I  argue Morris’s self-portraits were doing in the early 1960s.

Images of the artist and the reception of avantgarde art in post-war United States Morris’s art from the early 1960s consistently demonstrates an anxious concern regarding the question of whether and to what extent viewers are able to experience something of the artist’s studio practice when they encounter finished works. As Morris has put it, during this period he felt that ‘making objects entailed … a deliberate process that exists in time but is generally not visible in the object. I suppose there is something here that relates to Marx’s analysis of value and the commodity – i.e. how labour is unseen in the commodity.’10 One of his best-known pieces from this period, Box with the Sound of Its Own Making (1961), illustrates this concern especially neatly. This work is a wooden box, containing a tape-recording that Morris made while producing the object, which is played through external speakers. The tape includes the noise of his carpentry as well as other ambient studio sounds, so it is an index of his working practice and perhaps even a kind of auditory portrait. However, in practice it also produces a sense of distance from the artist, since viewers are made highly aware that although they can hear his labour, they cannot actually see it. As in Scale with Hand, spectators are initially invited to experience the artist’s physical

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relationship with the piece, but it subsequently becomes clear that in reality any route to doing so is barred. Morris’s concern that artworks might not offer any means of properly apprehending the artist’s bodily activity should be understood as a reaction to the legacy of Jackson Pollock and his drip paintings. As Amelia Jones has argued, ‘the gestural loops of paint’ that feature in these works seem to ‘tell the “story” of Pollock’s body in action’, such that it seems as if viewers can recreate the artist’s process by visually tracing the marks on his canvases.11 Morris has also said as much himself, claiming that in Pollock’s work, ‘the process is registered in the way the paint splashes or drips or falls. You have some indication that it was put down that way.’12 As Jones notes, this means that Pollock’s drip paintings ‘fall clearly on the side of indexicality’ rather than iconicity, because they indicate Pollock’s bodily movements through a direct, physical connection.13 Morris’s common use of bodily indexes in works from the early 1960s also suggests a more specific link with Pollock’s drip painting Number 1A (1948), which famously includes several handprints in its top-right corner. As the curator Charles Stuckey has written, these prints are ‘signatory, since they bear witness to Pollock’s physical role in the creation of the painting and confirm the interpretation of his work as “action painting” ’.14 The particular ‘interpretation’ of Pollock’s art that Stuckey referred to in the above quotation had its roots in an essay called ‘The American Action Painters’, which was written by the critic Harold Rosenberg in 1952. This text was extremely influential in the United States during the 1950s and the early 1960s. We can be certain that Morris was aware of this piece because he referenced the term ‘action painting’ in an unpublished text called ‘Anti-Art’ in 1961.15 While Rosenberg himself would later claim that the idea of action painting was inspired by watching Willem De Kooning work, his essay has always primarily been associated with Pollock’s drip paintings, especially with the images of Pollock flinging paint onto his canvases that were captured by the photographer and film-maker Hans Namuth in the early 1950s.16 In 1980, the American critic Barbara Rose even suggested that ‘Rosenberg was actually not talking about painting at all: he was describing Namuth’s photographs’.17 Rosenberg’s idea of action painting was closely bound up with a particular understanding of authorship. In ‘The American Action Painters’, he argued that works of this kind emphasize their own status as the results of a painter’s bodily activity.18 However, he also claimed that action painting ‘is inseparable from the biography of the artist. The painting is a “moment” in the unadulterated mixture of his life … The act-painting is of the same metaphysical substance as the artist’s



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existence.’19 So, as well as simply stating that action paintings reveal details of artists’ working processes, Rosenberg was also arguing that these works are deeply personally and existentially connected with the author. It is important to understand that the close connection between artist and work evidenced in Rosenberg’s notion of action painting had a significance in this period that went far beyond the realm of theory alone. This was a time when American avant-garde artists were becoming increasingly well-known across the United States and beyond, primarily as a result of being frequently discussed and represented in the mass media. During the 1940s, the painters of the New York School (such as Pollock, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell) had largely only showed work to each other and a small group of initiates in a limited number of galleries. As late as October 1947, Clement Greenberg wrote that the major abstract artists in the city had ‘no reputations that extend beyond a small circle of fanatics, [they are] art-fixated misfits who are isolated in the United States as if they were living in Palaeolithic Europe.’20 This changed significantly across the course of the 1950s and early 1960s. Hence, in 1964 the artist Alan Kaprow felt able to write that ‘the art public is no longer a select, small group … It is now a large diffused mass, soon to be called the public-in-general.’21 Caroline Jones has discussed this shift in her 1996 book Machine in the Studio.22 Jones demonstrates that abstract expressionist artists were increasingly featured in the mass media during the period. Specifically, they were very often represented through photographs of the artists in their studios as well as written descriptions of their working processes. Like Rosenberg’s theory, but more implicitly, the inclusion of these visual and written portraits served to solidify the idea that artworks are best understood alongside the body and the person of the author. Jones presents and analyses a range of examples in her book, so I will only give a brief selection here. We have already noted Hans Namuth’s photographs of Pollock working and he also took comparable pictures of other abstract expressionist artists, as well as a film depicting Pollock’s process. His photographs were widely disseminated through various books and magazines. Another key example is a series of pieces published in the journal Art News in the 1950s discussing the studio practices of different painters. These texts were variously called ‘De Kooning’, or ‘Pollock’, or ‘Tworkov Paints a Picture’, directly tying the works to their authors.23 However, we should equally note that these media representations were not limited to specialist journals or high-brow books. Instead, articles and reproductions also frequently appeared in mass-circulation magazines such as Time, Life and Vogue. For example, a 1956 Time article called ‘The Wild Ones’, which discussed the work of eight abstract expressionist

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painters, was accompanied by portrait photographs of all of the artists.24 Morris’s own image appeared in such publications several times during the 1960s, for example, in a group portrait also featuring several other artists, which was printed in an article in Time in 1968.25 These examples show that the notion of ‘action painting’ emerged at a time when avant-garde American art was being popularized across the United States through material means that were highly resonant with Rosenberg’s message. By constantly pairing artists and artworks together, these media representations seemed to suggest that the works in question were best understood when tied to the artist’s body and contextualized within the ‘unadulterated mixture’ of their life. However, this situation contained a deeply ironic contradiction. While portrait photographs and written descriptions in the mass media suggested that artworks are intimately bound to their authors, these very same images and texts actually helped to widen the gap between the viewer’s experience of art and its initial production more than ever before. Widespread dissemination of avant-garde art within the mass media made it increasingly common to encounter works at a great geographical remove from the sites and contexts where works were made. While media representations and the popular theory of action painting sought to make viewers feel as if encountering artworks could draw them close to the artist’s body, the truth was that they had never been further away. I believe that this contradiction helps to explain the awkward experience we face when encountering Morris’s self-portraits of the period. For example, we can find this same contradiction at work in another indexical self-portrait that Morris made in 1964, called Hand and Toe Hold. This is a set of two wooden beams, each covered with a sheet of lead and containing two square niches. The niches in the bottom beam contain plaster casts of Morris’s toes, while those in the top beam contain casts of his fingers. Especially when compared with the flat, largely unmarked surfaces of the lead sheets, these casts have a granular and highly tactile texture, making the indexes of Morris’s fingers and toes feel palpably physical and heightening our awareness that they are direct imprints from his body. This tangible quality solicits a desire to reach out and touch the casts – a distinctly bodily reaction, which seems appropriate for such a manifestly corporeal work. Here, as in Scale with Hand, we are invited to feel an intimate relationship with the artist’s body. In ‘The American Action Painters’, Rosenberg argued that during the postwar period, ‘the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act – rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze or “express” an object, actual or imagined’.26 Hand and Toe Hold could



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be taken to represent such an ‘arena’, since it seems to circumscribe the artist’s area of physical activity, with the casts indexically denoting the furthest reaches of his limbs. This provokes viewers to imagine the rest of his body occupying the space between the beams. Viewed this way, it appears to emphasize the involvement of Morris’s whole frame in the creation of his sculpture. However, this idea is immediately complicated when one considers the relationship between the casts and Morris’s bodily movements more closely, since the finger and toe-prints point in opposite directions from each other, making it almost impossible to imagine how a single body might simultaneously make all of these marks in these positions. In other words, viewers can see that the casts have been ‘redesigned’, so the work in fact ultimately opposes Rosenberg’s theory by instead serving a kind of re-production, rather than a direct bodying forth of the artist’s ‘metaphysical substance’. This stress on mediation is also highlighted by the casts’ organization into rectilinear niches, which are arranged according to a grid-like pattern and therefore suggest an administration of the body, rather than a direct confrontation. In summation, Hand and Toe Hold features the same dual dynamic of invitation and distancing that we earlier saw in Scale with Hand. Viewers find themselves drawn into a seemingly close relationship with the artist’s bodily labour, but it subsequently becomes clear that they are actually separated from the maker’s corporeal presence by a large distance. I believe that this expresses the reality of encountering avant-garde art in the United States during this period, when viewers were commonly encouraged to understand their relationship with works through the filter of the artist’s physical and personal presence, even though any true proximity to those things had in fact been obstructed.

Voyeuristic glimpses: Desiring the artist’s image One key question remains unanswered:  why were close links between artists and their works so often feigned in this period, when in truth such connections were disappearing? Was this simply an accidental hangover from an earlier time when artworks actually did remain within their producers’ milieu, or was there some other reason? In this final section I  will argue the latter. Furthermore, I will also show that Morris’s self-portraits of the early 1960s did not only reflect the contradictions of the situation around them but also sought to undermine it by attacking portraiture’s role in upholding certain ideological notions regarding the artist and their studio space. It is in this sense that they can be

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considered anti-portraits – not simply because they challenged a certain notion of portraiture but more importantly because they disrupted its function within a particular socio-historical environment. As we have seen, Morris’s self-portraits from this period continually emphasize a split between the finished art object and the process of artistic labour. They also highlight differences between the mediated display of works in magazines or exhibition environments and the direct, bodily activity of the artist. Furthermore, since viewers are made to feel as if their own encounters with these works are somehow lacking or inferior, the self-portraits also imply a hierarchy, privileging the artist’s seemingly more intimate relationship with his works over the secondary experience of subsequent reception. This could be taken to mean that the studio is tacitly presented as an especially authentic place for apprehending art. Since works like Portrait and Hand and Toe Hold suggest that the mediating effects of dissemination lead to a distanced and alienated experience of artworks, then the studio  – where works remain part of an ongoing practice and are perpetually open to alteration – must surely be a much better environment for encountering works than sanitized museums and edited media publications. In other words, by fetishizing the process of creation, Morris’s self-portraits seem to present the studio as a place that lies outside the conditions of mediated spectatorship. This is further suggested in a work called I-Box (1962). I-Box is a wooden cabinet with a hinged door on its front in the shape of the letter ‘I’. The letter is painted in bright pink, while the space around it is covered with a dull grey tone. Behind the door is a photograph of Morris standing upright and fully naked, grinning inanely at the camera. Critics have often understood this to be a profoundly frustrating work. The door seems to offer access into the inner sanctum of the ‘I’, as if opening the cabinet will divulge the essence of the artist’s subjectivity. However, behind the door there is only a photograph of his body. As W.  J. T.  Mitchell has put it, ‘inside there is nothing but another outside’.27 Just as in Morris’s other self-portraits, here a desire for access is provoked, but subsequently frustrated. However, what Mitchell and other commentators have failed to acknowledge is that this piece does in fact posit a moment when the artist definitely was present to a particular viewer – that is, the photographer. In implying that later viewers are unable to properly encounter the artist because they have missed their opportunity, I-Box projects a notion of an ideal place and time when the artistic encounter was more intimate and authentic. From Morris’s own account we know that the picture was taken in his studio, so it seems fair to assume that this is where the privileged moment is supposed to have



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taken place.28 Though viewers may not discern this from the photograph itself, the choppy texture of the paint on the outside of the cabinet does particularly emphasize the artist’s physical craft. As with most of Morris’s other self-portraits, this evidence of the artist’s touch leads our thoughts to the ‘acts’ he performed in the ‘arena’ of his working environment. The privilege that Morris’s works often seem to grant the studio parallels certain aspects of the media representation of avant-garde artists in post-war United States. As Jones demonstrates in Machine in the Studio, most images of avant-garde practitioners that were published in 1950s America show them alone in their studio environments.29 We can find examples of this in almost all of Namuth’s photographs of abstract expressionists from the period, which consistently depict them in their working spaces, without other people. Another important instance is Alexander Liberman’s photobook The Artist in His Studio (1955), which is entirely devoted to pictures of modern artists, who are always shown alone in their working environments.30 The constant isolation of the figures in these images seems to highlight the broader separation of American avant-gardists from the main stream of society, which we saw Greenberg discuss earlier. Dore Ashton has also emphasized this aspect of the New York School, writing that ‘[t]‌he “loft rats” were proud of their penury, their bohemianism, and their absolute isolation from uptown city mores’.31 The suggestion is that being alone in a studio loft symbolized artists’ autonomy, situating them as ‘outsiders’, on the peripheries of American society. According to Jones, such symbolism was emphasized and romanticized in portrait photographs of artists during the 1950s, which presented the studio as a ‘a private and hidden world’, an authentic place for artistic practice and experience, which did not conform to normative social conventions.32 Equally importantly, Jones also claims that these images pique the viewer’s interest by turning us into a ‘voyeur’ or a ‘spying penetrant’.33 In viewing such pictures, we are allowed to gaze in on the artist’s private realm, enjoying its presumed authenticity by proxy. Although Morris’s self-portraits seem to reiterate this common trope of the studio space as a privileged artistic environment, they also complicate it by refusing the voyeuristic mode of spectatorship that Jones discussed. When encountering these works viewers are blocked from any sense of closeness to the artist or entry into the studio, so they are also refused any feelings of vicarious enjoyment. Furthermore, since these works continually arouse and then frustrate a desire for contact with the artist’s body and the site of art practice, they also force viewers to confront their own libidinal investment in the fantasy of the studio as a private, hidden world that they can somehow access through

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portraits of artists or through works themselves. Rather than simply shutting down the dynamics of desire that images of artists in their studios provoke, Morris’s works encourage us to reflect on why these voyeuristic techniques hold such a strong appeal. This claim can be substantiated by discussing a sculpture that Morris planned (but never executed) sometime between 1961 and 1962. The work, provisionally titled I-Cabinet, was intended to be a box of exactly the same height as Morris, shaped like the letter ‘I’. A drawing of the box shows that it was supposed to have a door with a small, round handle on its front, while an adjacent annotation states that it was to contain ‘13 stories, miniatures, reproductions etc.’ of Morris’s work.34 As Jeffrey Weiss has noted, this idea was almost certainly influenced by Marcel Duchamp’s Boite-En-Valise (1935–41), a display case containing miniature replicas of many of Duchamp’s pieces.35 However, with its ‘I’-shaped form and its reflection of Morris’s height, I-Cabinet shifted Duchamp’s idea into the realm of self-portraiture. As with I-Box, the implication also seems to be that the objects inside the work might somehow combine to comprise the content or essence of the authorial ‘I’. Especially given that viewers are invited to open the door and delve inside the box, as if they were entering a piece of domestic furniture and rummaging through a set of personal belongings, the I-Cabinet seems to have a distinctly personal or even private quality, offering us access into the artist’s interior space. As with the photographs that Jones discussed, this work raises a certain voyeuristic and perhaps even rather invasive desire. If I-Cabinet were built, one can imagine that viewers would open its door and look through the texts, objects and images on display, not only assessing their individual merit but also searching for the connecting thread demonstrating their commonality as the collective expression of a single authorial self. Since the work remains unrealized and we do not know exactly what Morris would have included, there is no way to experience this directly. However, he did provide a hint by stating that I-Cabinet would include ‘stories’, ‘reproductions’ and ‘miniatures’  – second-hand documents of art practice, rather than actual works.36 As in I-Box, this would place the viewer at one remove from Morris and his practice. However, it would surely also lend I-Cabinet a distinctly fragmentary quality, with the artist’s body of work being broken down into separate documents. Each exhibit inside the box would provide snippets of information, without ever divulging the whole. In other words, they would almost certainly fail to supply any overarching authorial identity, instead offering both too little and too much information. Viewers would find numerous lines of enquiry but no single image of the artist as a coherent subject.37 For our purposes, the key



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thing is to imagine how spectators would feel when it became clear that their search for the authorial ‘I’ was doomed to failure. Not only would the idea of the work’s connection with the artist come under pressure but so too would the viewer’s own desire to become a ‘spying penetrant’. The feeling of frustration that must inevitably accompany the impossibility of locating the authorial ‘I’ may perhaps enforce a recognition of the viewer’s own investment in the notion of artistic subjectivity. Why does the idea of the artist hold such power for us? What leads us to delve ‘inside’ the work and attempt to reach its hidden depths? Similar questions were raised in the early 1960s by the American art historian Geraldine Pelles. It is worth briefly mentioning one particular text by Pelles – an essay called ‘The Image of the Artist’ (1962) – which can help to illuminate the dynamics of desire I  have identified in Morris’s self-portraits.38 ‘The Image of the Artist’ is essentially a history of the way that avant-garde artists have been represented (both by themselves and by others) from the nineteenth century till the early 1960s. Pelles does not explain why she became interested in that question during this period, but it seems significant that she did so at a time when images of artists were so prevalent in the mass media. Indeed, in one part of her text Pelles focusses on the appeal that images of avant-garde artists held for viewers in the post-war period. According to her, because they appeared to be lone creative workers, operating outside the main stream of society and beholden to nobody except themselves, in post-war United States avant-garde artists seemed to offer ‘a counterbalance to the levelling of aspirations in the society of the Organization Man’.39 ‘Despite economic embarrassment’, she wrote, the artist ‘seems to wield un-purchasable power as he manipulates an environment in the world of his painting. Because of his archetypal sacred aspect, the hope of salvation is attached to him in a world that badly needs saving.’40 Pelles’s essay puts an enormous symbolic weight on the shoulders of artists, who are expected to atone for the increasing bureaucratization of the United States and the alienation of ‘organization men’ from any real control over their labour. According to Pelles, artists can symbolically achieve this through their apparent ability to avoid the whims of the market (their ‘un-purchasable power’) as well as their seemingly unmediated authority over the entire process of artistic practice. Most importantly, Pelles implies that the idea of the artist as a cache of authentic meaning is inseparable from the problems of alienated capitalist society. Portraits of artists alone in their studios were appealing because they represented a space outside prevailing social conditions and offered respite from the world’s ills. Regarding the question that opened this section  – why close relationships between artists and their works were constantly feigned in this

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period – Pelles suggests that it was actually precisely because of mass-mediation in all of its forms that the idea of closeness to the lone, isolated artist became appealing. Rather than continuing in spite of the increasing distance between art practice and its reception, it was really because the viewer felt alienated from the authentic experience embodied in the figure of the artist that spying into the studio became an appealing activity. By constantly coupling signifiers of artistic labour with a profound experience of alienation, Morris’s self-portraits highlight this connection, emphasizing the ideological nature of art’s ‘sacred aspect’ and demanding confrontation with the social realities of post-war United States that lay beneath viewers’ frustrated desires. At the outset of this chapter I  stated that, in order for an artwork to be considered an ‘anti-portrait’ in any really meaningful sense, it must do more than merely challenging artistic or philosophical conventions. If we tackle ideas or aesthetic forms without considering their place within historically specific social contexts, we will inevitably remain blind to their political significance. This leaves us vulnerable to unwittingly reactionary or even oppressive thought. Morris’s self-portraits of the early 1960s are anti-portraits in the sense that, by prompting viewers to reflect upon their own investment in certain assumptions regarding the genre of portraiture, they disrupt the smooth functioning of a particular socio-economic assemblage – the American artworld of this period. They are radical because the critical perspective they encourage poses a threat to this institutional infrastructure as a whole, rather than just the limits of the genre. To conclude I  will discuss one more work, which precisely pivoted on such a moment of critical reflection. In 1961 the musician La Monte Young asked Morris to contribute to a series of evenings he was organizing in Yoko Ono’s loft in New York. The series primarily consisted of ‘live art’ events featuring music, dance, poetry, performance and lectures, rather than static paintings or sculptures. Morris’s contribution was a 50-foot long, curving wooden corridor, which he called Passageway. At its entry point the corridor was fairly wide and, because of the way that it curved, visitors standing at the door could not see to its end. This meant that viewers were encouraged to step inside and find out where the passage led. However, on the other side of the bend the corridor simply tapered to a point. As well as becoming a dead end, its wall also narrowed so that it closed in on visitors as they walked along, eventually squeezing their bodies into a tight space. It is important to mention that Morris was living in Ono’s loft at this time and also using it as a studio.41 Given this context, I submit that Passageway offered visitors an invitation into the artist’s private space – an ‘authentic’ encounter with



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the site of artistic production. Their appetite for this experience would have been whetted by their initial inability to see the corridor’s end. We can imagine that visitors would wonder what lay beyond the curve, heightening the mystery of the artist’s intimate abode. As they worked their way around Passageway, visitors might also have heard a sound – a pulsing, heartbeat-like noise, produced by a mechanical device that Morris concealed in the studio’s ceiling. He has reported that this sound was barely audible, and so not everybody noticed it.42 However, for those who did, its peripheral position just on the edge of hearing would surely have increased their feelings of anticipation. Moreover, the pulsing heartbeat also suggests corporeal proximity, as if literalizing the phrase ‘body of work’ and inviting visitors inside the artist’s physical frame. As in both ‘American Action Painters’ and media representations of artists from the period, here an artistic encounter was elided with feelings of bodily closeness. One might even claim that the artwork was being redefined as a kind of living portrait of its maker. Given the various senses in which viewers were primed for an encounter with Morris’s working environment, the moment when it became clear that they were actually being led down a thinning cul-de-sac must have been distinctly frustrating. Having built up desire and anticipation, Morris let it come crashing down. This is confirmed by an account of the work written by the artist Yvonne Rainer in 2006. Rainer stated that she had ‘traipsed downtown and up five flights expecting some kind of performance’. When she discovered what Passageway actually involved, she ‘was so outraged that I wrote on the wall “Fuck you too, Bob Morris.” ’43 Passageway disrupted a set of received associations between the figure of the artist, the artwork and the studio space, which were consistently congealed into portraits of artists in this period. However, more than simply questioning the images themselves, it also placed a blockage within the operations of New York’s avant-garde art scene. Morris literally interrupted the movement of bodies within this circuit, bringing them to an awkward halt. This intervention gains greater significance when we know that, during the early 1960s, the practice of studio visits was slowly being infiltrated and appropriated by an expanding art market. As Sharon Zukin has explained in a discussion of this period: Power in the modern art market began to derive from a closeness, or the appearance of closeness, to the artist’s studio … newly affluent art collectors understood going to the artist’s studio as a symbolic entrée into the upper class, a public or semi-public recognition of their elite status … Of course, new collectors merely joined a trek to the artist’s studio that already included art

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critics, museum curators, gallery ‘talent scouts’, and ‘uptown culturati’ who had begun to frequent ‘downtown’ parties.44

While this discussion of the significance of studio visits for the market might seem like a digression from issues of portraiture, my account of Passageway is intended to show precisely the opposite. This work played with the notion of art as a kind of self-portrait, popularized in ‘American Action Painters’, but it did so in a manner that made this issue inseparable from the artworld’s economic infrastructure. The feelings of closeness to the studio, which attracted collectors to the contemporary art market during this period, were fostered by images before being realized in downtown traipses. Throughout this chapter we have seen that Morris’s critical self-portraits sought to undermine this sense of intimate proximity. By literally creating a blockage on the route to the studio Morris aroused a sense of frustration through which libidinal investment could also be made apparent. Visitors were invited to consider why they were so troubled by these unfulfilled desires. ‘Fuck you too’ they said, but ‘fuck you’ to whom? To the artist who threw a spanner in the works or to the system which kept the cogs turning? Rather than a living portrait of its maker, Passageway ultimately offered an image of the artworld’s downtown trek piling up at the end of a narrowing corridor as bodies squeezed together and inched past one another – an event that started by heralding an image of the artist concluded as a kind of group portrait, depicting the expanding art scene itself.

Notes 1 In this sense the work might be compared with various paintings that Pablo Picasso made around 1910, including The Portrait of Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler (1910); see Yves-Alain Bois, ‘Pablo Picasso: The Cadaqués Experiment’, in Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925: How a Radical Idea Changes Modern Art, ed. Leah Dickerman (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012), pp. 40–1. 2 Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Writings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935), V, p. 75. 3 Peirce, Collected Writings, III–IV, p. 211. 4 Mary Ann Doane, ‘Indexicality: Trace and Sign: Introduction’, Differences, 18.1 (2007), 1–6 (2); and Mary Ann Doane, ‘The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity’, Differences, 18.1 (2007), 128–52 (134). 5 Charles Sanders Peirce, ‘On the Algebra of Logic: A Contribution to the Philosophy of Notation’, American Journal of Mathematics, 7.2 (1885), 180–96 (181).



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6 Rosalind Krauss, ‘The Mind/Body Problem: Robert Morris in Series’, in Robert Morris: The Mind/Body Problem (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1994), pp. 2–17 (4). 7 Krauss, ‘The Mind/Body Problem’, p. 10. 8 The knotty philosophical issues contained within Morris’s practice are also explored by Michael Newman in his chapter in this present volume. 9 For example, see Donald Kuspit, ‘Authoritarian Abstraction’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 36.1 (1977), 34–6; W. T. J. Mitchell, ‘Wall Labels: Word, Image, and Object in the Work of Robert Morris’, in Robert Morris: The Mind/Body Problem (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1994), pp. 62–79; and Brian Winkenweder, Reading Wittgenstein: Robert Morris’s Art as Philosophy (Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag, 2008). 10 Robert Morris, From Mnemosyne to Clio: The Mirror to the Labyrinth (Lyon: Musée d’Art Contemporain, 2000), p. 165. 11 Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 84. 12 Oral History Interview with Robert Morris, 1969, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; unpaginated. 13 Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject, p. 84. 14 Charles Stuckey, ‘Another Side of Jackson Pollock’, in Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles and Reviews, ed. Jasmine Moorhead (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1999), pp. 180–91 (182). 15 Robert Morris, ‘Anti-Art’ (unpublished manuscript, 1961). 16 Harold Rosenberg, ‘The Art Galleries’, New Yorker (16 February 1963), 134. 17 Barbara Rose, ‘Hans Namuth’s Photographs and the Pollock Myth’, in Pollock Painting, ed. Barbara Rose (New York: Agrinde, 1980) (unpaginated). 18 Harold Rosenberg, ‘The American Action Painters’, in The Tradition of the New (New York: Horizon Press, 1959), pp. 23–39 (26–7 and 33). 19 Rosenberg, ‘The American Action Painters’, pp. 27–8. 20 Cited in Dore Ashton, The Life and Times of the New York School (Bath: Adams and Dart, 1972), p. 164. 21 Allan Kaprow, ‘The Artist as a Man of the World’, in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), pp. 46–58 (54). 22 Caroline A. Jones, Machine in the Studio (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 23 Robert Goodnough, ‘Pollock Paints a Picture’, Art News, May 1951, 38–41; Thomas B. Hess, ‘De Kooning Paints a Picture’, Art News, March 1953, 30–3 and 64–7; and Fairfield Porter, ‘Tworkov Paints a Picture’, Art News, May 1953, 30–4. 24 Author unknown, ‘The Wild Ones’, Time Magazine, 20 February 1956, 70–5.

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25 Author unknown, ‘The Avant-Garde: Subtle, Cerebral, Elusive’, Time Magazine, 22 November 1968, 70–7. 26 Rosenberg, ‘The American Action Painters’, p. 24. 27 Mitchell, ‘Wall Labels’, p. 73. 28 Jeffrey Weiss and Clare Davis, Robert Morris: Object Sculpture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), p. 112. 29 Jones, Machine in the Studio, p. 35. 30 Alexander Liberman, The Artist in His Studio (London: Thames & Hudson, 1960). 31 Ashton, The Life and Times of the New York School, p. 3. 32 Jones, Machine in the Studio, p. 35. 33 Jones, Machine in the Studio, p. 35. 34 A reproduction of this drawing can be found in Weiss and Davis, Robert Morris: Object Sculpture, p. 35. 35 Weiss and Davis, Robert Morris: Object Sculpture, pp. 35–6. 36 Weiss and Davis, Robert Morris: Object Sculpture, p. 35. 37 A similar claim regarding this work is made by Weiss and Davis; for more on the complicated question of authorship and its relationship with the disparate products of any artist’s oeuvre, see Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’, in The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 1991), pp. 101–20. 38 Geraldine Pelles, ‘The Image of the Artist’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 21.2 (1962), 119–37. 39 Pelles, ‘The Image of the Artist’, p. 134; for the origin of the term ‘organization man’ see William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956). 40 Pelles, ‘The Image of the Artist’, p. 134. 41 Robert Morris, ‘Studios’, 2011. 42 Simon Grant, ‘Interview: Robert Morris’, Tate Etc., Autumn 2008. http://www.tate. org.uk/context-comment/articles/simon-grant-interviews-robert-morris (accessed 18 September 2015). 43 Yvonne Rainer, Facts Are Feelings: A Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), p. 197. 44 Sharon Zukin, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), pp. 92–3.

6

Subjects unknown: Found images and the depersonalization of portraiture Ella Mudie

Despite its ubiquitous presence across so many facets of everyday life, vernacular photography nonetheless occupies a marginal position in official histories of fine art portraiture. For as it stands the canon of portraiture largely recognizes the achievements of well-known artists, valorizing a certain ineffable talent for capturing the likeness of a subject and the artist’s privileged capacity to crystallize in imagistic form the idiosyncrasies of a sitter’s character and sense of identity. Thanks to its minor status then, the vernacular photograph, with its mostly unknown subjects, its speedy and amateurish production and the frequent banality of its origins and content, cannot help but perform a double manoeuvre of disruption when it enters into the field of fine art portraiture. On the one hand, the incorporation of vernacular photographs, anonymous and vintage snapshots, found images and even press clippings into portraiture appears to imbue the genre with a heightened sense of intimacy for, as Roland Barthes suggests in Camera Lucida, ‘the photograph possesses an evidential force … From a phenomenological viewpoint, in the Photograph, the power of authentication exceeds the power of representation.’1 Yet, on the other hand, when set adrift from their original contexts or familial settings the subjects of vernacular ephemera are transformed into enigmas and the very inscrutability of their identity holds the viewer at a distance. Thus when the found image is taken up as source material for the making of a fine art portrait a certain process of distancing unfolds as the artist, and by extension the viewer, enters into a mediated and in many respects impersonal relationship with their ‘unknown subject’. At a cultural moment preoccupied with identity the portrait inevitably risks complicity with instrumentalized uses of identification and for this reason the

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mapping of shadow histories of portraiture assumes a certain urgency. In this chapter I am concerned with a category of anti-portrait that is less about negating or deconstructing portraiture than it is with haunting it. As such, I  want to explore a particular approach to portraiture that renders its subjects anonymous, remote, unfamiliar and ultimately ‘depersonalized’ through oblique encounters with vernacular ephemera, in particular the found image or the anonymous photograph; categories of ‘non-art’ that, as I suggest above, shadow and stalk the fine art portrait. A number of contemporary artists with significant bodies of portraiture reveal an enduring interest in found images, and this chapter focuses in particular on the role of found photos in the work of Gerhard Richter, Tacita Dean and Luc Tuymans, in order to explore how the incorporation of found images into portraiture expands the genre into the realm of the mnemonic. Notwithstanding the diverse approaches of these three artists, some more explicitly engaged with found images than others, I want to suggest that their work is linked by the presence of a certain frisson of distance and anonymity that emanates in part from an engagement with or transformation of found sources. The estrangement effects that such works trigger in the viewer not only disturb conventional processes of identification but also productively open up portraiture’s relation to collective and historical memory; the phenomenology of loss, absence and desire; and the workings of chance and indeterminacy repressed in the studied corporeal presence of conventional portraiture.

Non-identity: Gerhard Richter’s photo pictures With the ascendency of Pop and Conceptual art practices in the 1960s, the incorporation of mechanically produced imagery into portraiture presented a significant challenge to some of the most firmly entrenched conventions of the genre. Andy Warhol’s coolly impersonal and highly stylized silk-screen portraits of celebrities modelled upon mass-media source imagery, for instance, signalled a radical abandonment of the idea that the task of the portrait was to make visible the interior reality or intrinsic personality of a subject. On the contrary, Warhol’s portraits were ultimately concerned with the means of representation themselves and how in a media age these might be consciously manipulated to construct iconic rather than ‘authentic’ identities. Occupying an ambiguous position oscillating between critique and valorization, other Pop artists such as Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein and Eduardo Paolozzi fashioned portraits from images plucked from mass-media sources that similarly shed



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little insight into the inner life of those portrayed but interrogated, rather, how life in a consumer society refashions subjectivity. At the same time, this turn to vernacular photographic imagery in the 1960s assumed multiple guises, paving the way for innovative approaches to working from photographs inspired by the impersonal approach of Pop but nevertheless concerned to resist what Armin Zweite describes as the ‘incessant superficiality’ of the Warholian mode, seeking to reproduce neither its ‘abandonment of the simulation of reality nor the aesthetic of consumption’.2 It is in this context that the grey monochrome Photo Pictures of the German artist Gerhard Richter (b. 1932), painted from banal photographic sources and emanating an unsettling air of indifference and anonymity, emerged in the early 1960s to steer portraiture based on found images into the darker terrain of the politics of memory, non-identity and cultural amnesia. As a starting point for thinking through the challenge that the found image presents to portraiture’s relationship to memory and identity, Richter’s extensive and ongoing archive of vernacular material, the Atlas (or Picture Album in English), provides an important framework for understanding the role of the photograph in the development of the artist’s depersonalized approach to portraiture and painting more broadly. Inaugurated with snapshots from the early 1960s that were initially sourced from the artist’s own family albums, the Atlas has subsequently evolved to encompass over five thousand photographs, drawings, diagrams, magazine and newspaper clippings and other reproductions amassed by Richter across more than five decades. Publicly exhibited a number of times in gallery settings, the eclectic found imagery of the Atlas now occupies the status of an autonomous work in its own right while also serving as a document of the extent to which the turn to photography as a source for painting freed Richter from the constraints of a modernist ‘make it new’ ethos thanks to its readymade content. As Paul Moorhouse suggests, for Richter ‘using photographs to depict individuals or situations that were deliberately “banal” challenged conventional assumptions about artistic creativity and personal expression’.3 Yet the artist’s turn to mechanically produced imagery as the source for his Photo Pictures in the 1960s cannot be read simply as a negation of inherited models of painting. Rather it signalled, in a far more complex fashion, the beginnings of a sustained investigation into the nature of appearances and the uncertainty of our knowledge of reality as received through the senses. Just as the inherently unstable ontological status of the publicly exhibited Atlas unravels distinctions between the source image and the finished or autonomous artwork, the use of found imagery in Richter’s paintings challenges entrenched ideas around the

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necessary conditions for the making of a portrait, perhaps most notably the assumption that the artist and model need to share a live encounter. To this end, Richter has remarked: I don’t think the painter need either see or know his sitter. A portrait must not express anything of the sitter’s ‘soul’, essence or character. Nor must a painter ‘see’ a sitter in any specific, personal way; because a portrait can never come closer to the sitter than when it is a very good likeness. For this reason, among others, it is far better to paint a portrait from a photograph, because no one can ever paint a specific person – only a painting that has nothing whatsoever in common with the sitter. In a portrait painted by me, the likeness to the model is apparent, unintentional and also entirely useless.4

Indeed Richter’s sceptical distrust towards the capacity of the image to represent any intrinsic or ‘true’ identity is indicative of the larger shift towards a depersonalized mode of portraiture that took place in the latter part of the twentieth century according to which the goal was not necessarily to distort or to consciously manipulate the representation of the subject beyond recognizability but rather to play with the tensions between absence and presence, intimacy and distance, possession and loss, that photographic imagery, in particular, makes manifest. In Richter’s 1964 Photo Picture, Woman with Umbrella, for instance, the title of the painting offers little clue as to the identity of the modestly dressed woman it depicts. Demure in a box-shaped pale-yellow overcoat and black pencil skirt redolent of the everyday attire of a city office worker, the woman clasps with one hand a folded umbrella close to her body while her other hand covers her mouth in a gesture that implies a tremor of shock or grief that is at odds with the painting’s overall prosaic atmosphere. Upon closer scrutiny, this apparently anonymous woman is identifiable as Jacqueline Kennedy. The painting is imbued with pathos when one learns that the photographic source material is a press photo taken just moments after John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Presenting an inherently depersonalized representation of the murdered president’s wife, Woman with Umbrella runs counter, then, to the revelatory impetus of the portrait and the event logic of the press snapshot.5 As Catharina Manchanda points out, ‘sensationalistic photographs are few and far between in his [Richter’s] oeuvre, and the more jarring or emotionally loaded the photographic image, the more concealing Richter’s painterly rendition becomes. Thus, ambiguity replaces the instant recognition and directness normally offered by a photograph.’6 Furthermore, by rendering strange and remote such an iconic figure the overall effect of Richter’s painting is to quietly instil doubt into the



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very idea that it is possible to make manifest in imagistic form the interiority of another human being. This speaks to the broader enterprise of Richter’s depersonalized portraiture, and indeed his body of work as whole, as ‘intended to undermine the belief that we have direct access to truth by any means’.7 In the Photo Pictures, then, Richter depicts ‘absent, unfathomable figures, caught up within an intangible reality. All that remains are shreds of appearance, with nothing quite as it seems.’8 As in many of Richter’s portraits, Woman with Umbrella depicts an identifiable or known figure and it is important to note that Richter deals neither solely nor principally with strictly anonymous material. Working, rather, with a broad spectrum of mechanically produced sources, Richter is just as likely to use intimate photographs of his own family taken by himself and others (e.g. Family 1964, Betty 1988, Moritz 2000) or images of historical personages drawn from sources such as encyclopaedias (48 Portraits 1971–2), as is newspaper and magazine clippings (Party 1963, Mother and Daughter 1965), as well as anonymous snapshots taken by unknown photographers (Mrs Niepenberg 1965). From an historical perspective, the greyscale Photo Pictures principally occupied Richter’s attention over a ten-year period spanning 1962 to 1972; however, in the late 1980s Richter returned to these techniques with a cycle of fifteen canvases, painted in 1988, that warrant consideration for the complex dialogue with history and the politics of personal and collective memory, identity and the workings of cultural amnesia that the paintings enact. Dealing with one of the most contested events of late-twentieth-century German history, October 18, 1977 (1988) depicts the last days of a cast of young middle-class radicals turned terrorists known as the Baader-Meinhof Group. Reacting against the political conservatism and the culture of denial towards the country’s fascist past that was sublimated into an ethos of economic advancement in Germany’s programme of post-war national rehabilitation, the actions of the Baader-Meinhof Group rapidly escalated from activism to fatal terrorist assaults, culminating in their arrest in 1972 and eventual imprisonment at Stammheim prison, Stuttgart. The date of Richter’s cycle of paintings, 18 October 1977, is the fateful day when two of the radicals, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, were found dead in their prison cells (a third, Jan-Carl Raspe, died from a bullet wound shortly after being admitted to hospital). To this day ambiguity surrounds the prisoners’ cause of death and whether they committed suicide or were murdered at the hands of the state. Regardless of their cause of death the group remain ‘emblematic of the reckless idealism and bitter failure of youthful revolt in the Cold War era’.9

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It has been noted that a ‘tension between distance and empathy [provides] the basic dynamic’10 of the October 18, 1977 paintings and this tension is especially evident in Richter’s portraits of the women of the group. In Youth Portrait (1988), a painting of the group’s key female protagonist, Ulrike Meinhof, Richter works from the photographic source of a film publicity photo in which Meinhof is posed in the style of a celebrity portrait or a high-school year book photo. Taken around 1970 when the idealistic young journalist had just joined the radical left-wing Red Army Faction (RAF), the original photograph captures her at a moment when her induction into terrorism loomed imminent. Comparing Richter’s portrait, which the artist describes as ‘sentimental in a bourgeois way’,11 with the source photo, a number of critics have drawn attention to Meinhof ’s expression which is more hardened and severe in the original. Richter clearly modified his source, softening the appearance of Meinhof and rendering her more youthful, innocent and even radiant in a manner that belies her impending fate as a militant radical, imbuing the painted portrait with what Roland Barthes calls the punctum of the photograph: ‘that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)’.12 Yet the piercing poignancy of Youth Portrait is strikingly at odds with the deeply melancholic aura that emanates from the remainder of the paintings, especially those depicting scenes of death. Situated between these two poles of hope and despair is the ethereal triptych of Gudrun Ensslin, Confrontation 1, 2 and 3 (1988), a suite of portraits painted from furtively captured photographs taken during Ensslin’s escorted passage to a police line-up after her arrest in 1972, some five years before her death. Stripped of any detail of the setting, Ensslin occupies a liminal space between life and death. In the middle image, Confrontation 2 (Figure 6.1), Ensslin hovers spectrally before the viewer as a phantom presence, poised between appearance and disappearance. With a disarmingly enlivened expression she looks directly outwards as if to meet the gaze of the viewer yet the empathy elicited in her depiction is underscored by ambivalence. For her humanized representation is shadowed by the dark reality of the violent crimes she committed. As Ensslin’s indistinct figure recedes into the grey voided space of the painting the overall aura of morbid desolation disturbs any easy or direct flow of identification between subject and viewer. If the irresolvable contradictions and seductive ambiguities of the earlier greyscale Photo Pictures speak to Richter’s concern for picturing the doubt and uncertainty underlying the relationship of reality to appearance, the paintings of October 18, 1977 suggest a more potent critique of the desire to resolve contradiction through the totalizing logic of identity thinking and ideological commitment. In this way, the contradictions and complexities of



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Figure 6.1  Gerhard Richter, Confrontation 2 (1988). Oil on canvas, 112 cm × 102 cm. © Gerhard Richter 2018 / Richter Studio, Köln.

the Baader-Meinhof cycle embody what the German philosopher and critical theorist, Theodor Adorno, terms ‘non-identity thinking’. A cognitive paradigm intended to counter the objectifying tendencies of identity thinking which subsumes diverse objects under laws and explanatory systems that obliterate difference, non-identity thinking acknowledges the unavoidable gap between object and concept and locates within this gap a longing for conditions which do not yet exist.13 Adorno’s paradigm of non-identity thinking provides an apt framework for understanding how the air of indifference, detachment and overall lack of conviction in Richter’s Photo Pictures imply neither nihilism nor cynicism on the part of the artist but in fact a moral position insofar as the works

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enact a resistance to the totalizing logic of identity thinking. At the same time, the mnemonic preoccupations of October 18, 1977, their incessant return to themes of mortality, historical trauma and the work of mourning reveal how the use of the photographic source in Richter’s work challenges the ‘present-ness’ of the painted portrait by engaging the ‘that has been’ of the photograph.14 As Alex Danchev points out, these are ‘history paintings but also memory paintings’.15 For Richter, ‘the daily practice of painting is the remembrance of things past. If painting is remembering, these paintings seem to re-enact that painful process. The October cycle is among other things a cycle of memory: tenebrous memory made manifest.’16

The found portrait Where Richter’s Photo Pictures make apparent the complex relationship of vernacular photography to the workings of time, memory and history, while revealing the capacity of the painted photograph to challenge representational conventions of the portrait genre, in what follows I  turn my attention to another artist for whom found imagery has played an important yet somewhat under-theorized role in the development of her portraiture work. Born in 1965 in Canterbury, England, Tacita Dean came to prominence in the 1990s for her sophisticated and rigorous yet understated film and installation projects concerned with forgotten incidents of history and enigmatic stories of disappearance, often realized with materials and technologies on the cusp of obsolescence, from 16mm celluloid film to old photographs and postcards rescued from the junk heaps of flea markets. Like Richter, Dean’s ongoing preoccupation with the vernacular snapshot speaks to her attunement to a certain existential condition of loss and disappearance peculiar to modernity. In Dean’s case, however, it is important to emphasize that the found nature of the photograph is of utmost significance. The artist’s impulse to incorporate recovered images and objects into her heterogeneous body of work cannot be separated from an enduring concern for the manner in which chance, the accident, randomness and coincidence complicate conscious representations of subject-hood. Having relocated from Britain to the German capital of Berlin in 2000, the artist’s encounter with this city’s layered palimpsest history, combined with the accessibility of its distinctive flea markets, has accentuated the role of found images in her work. Alongside her extensive body of film work, to date Dean



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has realized a number of projects incorporating found images and objects. In Painted Kotzsch Trees (2008), for instance, Dean delicately overpaints with white gouache a set of small, damaged albumen prints by the nineteenth-century German photographer August Kotzsch while The Russian Ending (2001) saw the artist create a suite of twenty black-and-white photogravures with etching from found postcards depicting accidents and disasters, which Dean overprinted with film direction-style notations. More recently Dean contributed to an exhibition and book project on the life of the Swiss writer Robert Walser17 a series of collages made from old postcards and drawings from Walser’s time entitled Berlin and the Artist (2012). Yet Dean’s most well-known project composed from found photographs is undoubtedly Floh (2001), a limited-edition book commissioned by the prestigious art press Steidl and realized in collaboration with artist and printmaker Martyn Ridgewell. With its meticulous laying out of 163 amateur photographs found in flea markets, the book/album embraces the ‘inadequacies of the untrained photographer’, according to Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, ‘developing only a tentative, stammering narrative in the iconographic or typological arrangement, which the artist gave to them’.18 The images in Floh are ‘found’ in the sense that Dean did not deliberately set out to retrieve or purchase pre-conceived sets or types of vernacular photographs but rather in selecting the images for the book she surrendered herself to the workings of what André Breton and the Surrealists termed le hasard objectif, or objective chance. A highly intuitive process, objective chance names those fortuitous discoveries that occur by luck yet nonetheless gain an aura of significance when analysed as corresponding with some unconscious wish or yet to be consciously articulated desire. In this respect, Lerm Hayes’s description of Floh as a ‘stammering narrative’ is apt as it infers that beneath its conscious layout – and despite the randomness of the selection of images it is indeed possible to discern thematic links and an organizing curatorial logic at play  – there is nonetheless something ‘stammering’ or unconscious in the psychic affects they invoke. From its opening double page spread, which presents on the left-hand side an image of a pair of women in black coats standing beside two identical model white BMW cars, juxtaposed on the right with an image of the very same white cars less the two women, these minor quivers in perception create a tension between absence and presence, appearance and disappearance that work upon the viewer at a subliminal level. At the same time, the book is inclusive in its impulse to rescue those images perhaps discarded or rejected from family albums for their flaws. As Margaret Iversen observes, the photographs in Floh are ‘a regular inventory of technical errors:  odd framing, poor focus,

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over  – and underexposure, camera shake, and blurred subjects in motion, to name but a few’, while ‘the photographs themselves have been subjected to accidents and wear and tear such as fingerprints, scratches, and other marks’.19 Many of the snapshots of people, in particular, have an endearing oddness about them and their imperfections, awkward poses or the photo-mechanical failures of their execution work to pierce the viewer in the manner of Barthes’s notion of the punctum. In this way, the vintage snapshots presented in Floh not only intrigue and unsettle the viewer in their strangeness but also speak to Dean’s ongoing interest in the peculiar openness of analogue imagery to the workings of happenstance, randomness and contingent events. Given the close association between found imagery and chance that vernacular photography elicits it is necessary to ask what implications this might raise, then, for the depersonalization of portraiture. On one level, the preoccupation with the accidental, the flawed and the imperfect that characterizes Dean’s interest in the ‘found portrait’ offers a subtle critique of the present’s accelerated shift towards digital photography and the growing tendency to simply delete and discard mistakes, which for Dean involves a certain sterilization of identity, memory and history. At the same time, it is important to recognize that despite the vintage photograph’s appearance of authenticity and the apparent intimacy of its subject matter, in reality the vernacular photograph cannot grant any greater access to the ‘inner truth’ of its subjects than any other form of photographic or figurative representation. On the contrary, vernacular photographs, as Geoffrey Batchen points out, ‘tantalize precisely by proffering the rhetoric of a transparency to truth and then problematizing it, in effect inscribing the writerly and the readerly in the same perceptual experience’.20 In a similar vein, Mark Godfrey emphasizes how the found photograph in fact frustrates the viewer’s need to know a subject and that ultimately it is ‘its opacity’21 that attracts us. Thus the ‘unknown subjects’ of Floh are precisely of interest for the extent to which they problematize, rather than solve, the issue of representing the subject in so-called documentary mediums such as film and photography. As such I want to suggest, then, that the opacity of the ‘found portrait’ has an important bearing upon the manner in which Dean portrays the subjects of her conceptual film portraits or ‘homages’ as they are sometimes called. For even though her film portraits are not created from found footage (Dean shoots original film), the films nevertheless embody an atmosphere of the film-maker having stumbled, or perhaps ‘stammered’, upon her subject, an effect no doubt influenced in part by the artist’s enduring preoccupation with found images and objects.



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Reflecting upon her oeuvre of film portraits, Dean has joked about her ‘father complex’ as many of her projects focus upon older male figures, often but not always artists.22 Indeed, Dean has captured an impressive array of luminary elders on film with her league of subjects including the seminal American choreographer Merce Cunningham, the Italian artist Mario Merz, literary translator and poet Michael Hamburger and American artists Claes Oldenburg and Cy Twombly, among others. Shot using the analogue technology of 16mm celluloid film, Dean’s portraits typically have a vintage look and feel about them and with their quotidian settings, and slow and meditative real-time pace of filming may be described as employing a vernacular aesthetic. On one level, Dean’s preoccupation with capturing venerable figures in such an attentive manner speaks to the artist’s respect for age and experience. It reflects, too, her sensitivity to the specificity of the medium of film and of its relationship to time, as well as a broader desire to convey through film a poetic experience of the transience of existence and the interpenetration of time, space and being. Yet on another level, Dean’s interest in the opaque mnemonic traces of the found photograph also translates in her portraiture work into a certain intoxication with the elder figure’s embodiment of lived time, as a kind of living monument imbued with the weight and impenetrability of history. Thus her portraits make manifest the extent to which the mystery of human identity, its inherent unknowability, paradoxically deepens rather than lessens over time with a person’s ageing. As Dean reflects: Why we become who we become, or do as we do, or are born with a facility for something when others are not, remains, for the most part, unknown to us. We cannot often guess what incident or influence arranged our lives or ambitions in the way that it did, or whether in fact it was something deeper. And most mysterious of all is why artists become artists, and why they become the artists they are.23

These remarks are drawn from a preface written by Dean for one of her film portraits, a twenty-nine-minute account of the ordinary vicissitudes of the everyday life of the American painter Cy Twombly, titled after the late artist’s given name, Edwin Parker (2011). For this project Dean predominantly filmed Twombly at his studio and surrounds in the quiet town of Lexington, Virginia, where the artist was born and returned to spend a portion of each year before he passed away in mid-2011. As such the film is typically described as ‘intimate’ in its undramatic portrayal of Twombly shuffling about amid the clutter of his studio (Figure  6.2) where, ‘Behind the blinds in its small storefront window

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Figure 6.2  Tacita Dean, Edwin Parker (2011). Film still, 16mm colour, optical sound, 29 minutes. Image Courtesy the artist, Frith Street Gallery, London, and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris, © Tacita Dean.

he sits, thinks, and works, but mostly he sits, content to watch the neighbors pull up and park, buy cakes or their newspapers next door, and then leave again.’24 Yet not unlike the so-called ‘intimacy’ of found photographs, which ‘tantalize precisely by proffering the rhetoric of a transparency to truth and then problematizing it’,25 the inroads that Dean offers into the interiority of her filmed subjects like Twombly are oblique, at best. Writing about Dean’s 2007 portrait of Michael Hamburger, Susan Billinge observes that the film sets up an ‘interesting play between intimacy and distance. For the camera not to intrude implies intimacy but Hamburger’s remoteness denies us the feeling of complete access.’26 Eschewing the documentary maker’s predilection for interviews, voiceovers and testimony from relatives and friends, Dean opts for a form of silent witnessing wherein the ordinary actions of the subject and the scene of everyday life are simply permitted to unfold before the camera in an undirected manner (although Dean is a meticulous editor of her footage post-filming). Thus an aporia of identity lies at the heart of Dean’s elliptical and circuitous approach to portraiture. Recalling the sense of mystery provoked by the gazing upon of ‘unknown subjects’ in anonymous snapshots, the elegant remoteness of Dean’s artisanal film portraiture offers an antidote to the spectacular revelatory impulse and cult of personality, presenting rather an homage to the lived time of elder figures and an elegiac acknowledgement of life’s finitude.



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Luc Tuymans: Picturing banality In the portraiture and conceptual projects of Tacita Dean there is a fateful significance afforded to the ‘lucky find’ that distinguishes Dean from other artists working from found and vernacular imagery for whom provenance figures less strongly in their attraction to pre-existing sources. An interesting comparison in this respect is found in the work of the Belgian artist Luc Tuymans, born in 1958 near Antwerp, who consistently works from pre-existing images such as photographs, film stills and visual material sourced from the internet, books and magazines. Yet rather than emphasizing their status as rescued or recovered objects, Tuymans will frequently further remediate the found image by re-photographing it  – initially with Polaroids and now often using the smartphone – before beginning to paint from the image. While the smartphone and the Polaroid represent quite distinct technologies, Toby Kamps notes that both mediums offer Tuymans ‘casual, low-contrast images that match his sensibility’.27 In referring to the sensibility of Luc Tuymans it is impossible to avoid the question of its banality, an aspect of Tuymans’s painting that attracts praise and criticism in equal measure. In the final part of this chapter I want to briefly consider how the picturing of banality in Tuymans’s paintings might depersonalize portraiture to critical effect as the aesthetics of anonymity paradoxically works to bring the horrors of history back into the discourse of painting. When Luc Tuymans began his artistic career in the mid-1980s his earliest works were devoid of human figures. From the outset, history (and to some extent, biography)28 entered Tuymans’s work in an indirect manner. In the early paintings of such apparently unexceptional scenes as the flesh-toned interior of an unfurnished room (Gas Chamber 1986), a vista of crudely painted withered black forest trees (Schwarzheide 1986)  and the scrawled outline of a grid-like tenement block (Our New Quarters 1986), Tuymans was in fact painting what Ulrich Loock terms ‘the missing object of reproduction’,29 namely the collective trauma of the Second World War and the inadequacy of cultural memory in dealing with the horrors of the Holocaust and the trauma of the concentration camps. With the development of his oeuvre the historical compass of Tuymans’s painting has since broadened to consider such themes as the politics of nationalism and the mutual imbrication of violence and power in the structures of colonialism. Still it is a vast and heterodox array of seemingly inconsequential imagery, from wallpaper and embroidery patterns to leopard skin rugs, drum

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sets and medical images, rendered in muted tones and with an ‘appearance of painterly clumsiness’,30 that continues to dominate his canvases. Today, Tuymans is well known for his closely cropped, detached and anonymized portrait images that cultivate an atmosphere of morbidity and indifference. Yet the artist has revealed that in the early stages of his practice ‘he was unable to paint portraits for a long time’.31 Tellingly, the first human-like figures to appear in Tuymans’s oeuvre were in fact painted from model toys, dolls, mannequins and puppets. In the greyscale triptych Käthe Grüsse (1990), an uncanny suite of blank, expressionless child-like faces is modelled upon an androgynous doll whose gender could be alternated from male to female by changing its hair and clothing. Here, the depersonalized aesthetic now synonymous with Tuymans’s portraiture is clearly prefigured. Indeed, of the artists discussed in this chapter Tuymans is the one who perhaps most neatly fits the definition of a maker of anti-portraits given the distinct challenge that his treatment of the face, in particular, presents to the conventions of portraiture. Where the portrait artist typically privileges the eyes as the windows to the soul, to cite a common cliché, in Tuymans’s painting the eyes may be shut, averted from the gaze of the viewer, concealed by thick rimmed glasses or simply rendered dead and hollow of expression. This failure to depict expressions that elicit empathy from or a connection with the viewer has an ambiguous meaning in his work. In some contexts, such as in the depictions of war criminals (e.g. Himmler 1997–8, or Die Zeit 1988), vacant eyes conjure a lack of compassion and may allude to the keeping of secrets, the repression of guilt and unacknowledged culpability in acts of violence and cruelty. By contrast, in the depiction of more anonymous or ordinary citizens blank expressions suggest a subject slipping or receding from memory and thus speak to a certain anxiety over the ease with which people are forgotten and disappear from history. And if facial marks or wrinkles of the skin are capitalized upon by the portrait painter as signs of character and individuality, Tuymans by comparison has a tendency to efface the complexion of his models, giving them an inscrutable visage that deflects the piercing gaze of the viewer. For Tuymans an important turning point in his painting occurred by way of his discovery of medical imagery, according to which picturing the face and the body through the detached medical gaze ‘forces the portraits to freeze into masks, depersonalized facades’.32 In the 1992 exhibition, ‘The Diagnostic View’, Tuymans presented a series of portraits in which extreme close-up views of the face and rectangular cropping was redolent of the examination logic of medical scanning technologies (Figure  6.3). In more recent portraits, the ‘zoomed-in’ faces create a sense of oppression and



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Figure 6.3  Luc Tuymans, The Diagnostic View IV (1992). Oil on canvas, 57 × 38.2 cm. Private collection, on long-term loan to De Pont Museum, Tilburg. Image courtesy Studio Luc Tuymans, Antwerp © Luc Tuymans.

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claustrophobia in the picture that speak to the estrangement or alienation effects manifest in the close-up voyeurism of a screen-based culture. The banal anonymity underpinning Tuymans’s representation of the human subject speaks, then, to the impossibility of portraiture in an age of instrumentalized and sensationalized identity politics. As such his depersonalized approach has ushered in a new mode of portraiture among a younger generation of artists. Art critic Jordan Kantor describes this as the ‘Tuymans effect’, namely the ‘profound, if sometimes ineffable, way in which the look, subjects, and even fundamental painterly approach of Tuymans’ work has saturated a large and increasingly significant territory’.33 In the domain of the figurative portrait, the detached and impersonal rendering of found imagery, snapshots and anonymous photographic sources resonates with artists as a means through which to explore the ambiguities and contradictions of subjectivity as it is shaped and performed within a cultural landscape heavily mediated by technology. An atmosphere of menace and disquiet, for instance, emanates from the portraits of Polish painter Wilhelm Sasnal (b. 1972). As in Tuymans’s paintings, faces in Sasnal’s portraits may be absent of features, washed out, partially rendered or abstractly disfigured. Yet as Sasnal shrouds his figures in an atmosphere of private withdrawal and casual retreat, his tendency to conceal through anonymity is paradoxically intimate. As a deft negation of the hyperbole of self-display that rules today’s media culture, these enigmatic and indifferent portraits also preserve in their own way something of the inscrutability of identity, the self as an ambiguous composite of personal and historical memory. Running parallel to the development of the ‘Tuymans effect’ in contemporary art, in his own work Tuymans appears increasingly interested in depicting the light of the digital screen and its inherent virtuality, with implications for his depersonalized approach to portraiture. In a 2015 exhibition at David Zwirner Gallery in London, ‘The Shore’, Tuymans presented three small portraits of eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment thinkers (William Roberston 2014, John Robison 2014 and John Playfair 2014), based on photographs of portraits by the Scottish artist Henry Raeburn taken by Tuymans during a visit to the University of Edinburgh. In these portraits the faces of the subjects are so closely focussed and tightly cropped as to render them near unidentifiable (only the titles of the paintings furnish us with their identities) while the blue hue and white highlights that reflect off the flesh of the men’s faces recall the ‘mediatised luminescence’34 of the digital screen. As such, the portraits ‘construct a new context in which historical subjects are presented as if part of the contemporary moment, just as current events are inevitably filtered



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through their appearance in the mass media, with its often hidden structures and regulations’,35 reflecting the artist’s concern for how the virtuality of the digital age further exacerbates the ‘flattening out’ tendencies of modernity. As new technology steers Tuymans’s depersonalized portraiture into the complex mnemonic terrain of the digital age, such paintings impel us, then, to consider whether the portrait will further collude in new forms of amnesia and forgetting. For the digital screen, with its illusion of proximity to the subject, further refracts our capacity to scrutinize the specificity of a person’s character and the historical context of one’s actions, thereby distancing the viewer from the space wherein accountability lies. Today it may be commonplace to remark that portraiture serves a commemorative purpose, yet the diverse bodies of work addressed in this chapter demonstrate how, in the contemporary context, the relationship between memory, subjectivity and identity as mediated via such genres as portraiture has become an extremely complicated one. Our sense of self is inextricably linked to our memories and connection to the past yet the portraits (or anti-portraits) of Richter, Dean and Tuymans constantly work to shore up the shortcomings of memory and the fallacies of identity as a construct. Whether eliciting encounters with the inadequacy of memory as in the case of Tuymans’s oblique renderings of its slippages and elisions, exposing the uncertainty of memory as it relates to the doubtful nature of appearances in the photo-paintings of Richter or offering elegies for disappearing figures and modes of existence on the cusp of obsolescence as in the film portraits of Dean, the use of vernacular, found and pre-existing imagery haunts the portrait’s privileged claim to the representation of identity. For the flaws of the found image, its anonymity and the frequent banality or prosaic ordinariness of its content and mechanical modes of production prise open gaps and fissures of doubt in the representation of the subject that call into question the totalizing logic of identity thinking. With this in mind the depersonalization of portraiture via encounters with found images might even be considered a generative and open gesture insofar as its opacity works to create an indeterminate space for the recognition of self and other as inherently, and profoundly, unknown subjects.

Notes 1 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 2000), pp. 88–9.

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2 Armin Zweite, ‘Gerhard Richter’s Album of Photographs, Collages and Sketches’, in Gerhard Richer Atlas: The Reader, ed. Iwona Blazwick, Janna Graham, and Sarah Auld (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2012), pp. 30–61 (58). 3 Paul Moorhouse, Gerhard Richter Portraits: Painting Appearances (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 21. 4 Gerhard Richter, interview with Dieter Hülsmanns and Fridolin Reske, 1966, quoted in Moorhouse, Gerhard Richter Portraits, p. 19. 5 Richter’s Photo Picture of Jacqueline Kennedy also bears comparison with Warhol’s Four Jackies (1964). Similarly based upon press photos, the grainy and bleached aesthetic of the Four Jackies conveys a distancing effect also discernible in Richter’s image; however, Warhol’s serialized portraits more strongly emphasize the morbid spectacle of the saturated media coverage of the event. 6 Catharina Manchanda, ‘Estranging Everyday Photography: Richter’s Early Paintings’, MoMa, 5.2 (2002), 10–14 (12). 7 Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: Doubt and Belief in Painting (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2003), p. 87. 8 Moorhouse, Gerhard Richter Portraits, p. 69. 9 Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: October 18, 1977 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2000), p. 30. 10 Storr, Gerhard Richter: October 18, 1977, p. 30; Storr’s description of the ‘tension between distance and empathy’ summarizes the analysis of critic Stefan Gurmer, which in turns takes its cue from Richter’s own assessment of the basic dynamic of the paintings. 11 Richter quoted in Storr, Gerhard Richter: October 18, 1977, p. 95. 12 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 27. 13 The paradigm of non-identity thinking is outlined by Theodor Adorno in Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1973). 14 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 115. 15 Alex Danchev, ‘The Artist and the Terrorist, or The Paintable and Unpaintable: Gerhard Richter and the Baader-Meinhof Group’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 35.2 (2010), 93–112 (97). 16 Danchev, ‘The Artist and the Terrorist, or The Paintable and Unpaintable’, p. 99. 17 ‘In the Spirit of Walser: Tacita Dean, Mark Wallinger’, Donald Young Gallery, Chicago, 3 December 2011–4 January 2012. 18 Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, ‘Considering the Minor in the Literary and Photographic Works of Rodney Graham and Tacita Dean’, in Minor Photography: Connecting Deleuze and Guattari to Photography Theory, ed. Mieke Bleyen (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2012), pp. 85–102 (86). 19 Margaret Iversen, ‘Analogue: On Zoe Leonard and Tacita Dean’, Critical Enquiry, 38.4 (2012), 796–818 (813).



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20 Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Vernacular Photographies’, History of Photography, 24.3 (2000), 262–71 (268). 21 Mark Godfrey, ‘Photography Lost and Found: On Tacita Dean’s Floh’, October, 114 (2005), 90–119 (115). 22 See Dean’s comments in this vein in her conversation with Marina Warner in Marina Warner, ‘Interview: Marina Warner in Conversation with Tacita Dean’, in Tacita Dean, ed. Jean-Christophe Royoux, Marina Warner, and Germaine Greer (London: Phaidon, 2006), pp. 8–44 (15). 23 Tacita Dean, ‘Edwin Parker’, in Tacita Dean: Five Americans, ed. Massimiano Gioni and Margot Norton (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 2012), pp. 40–1 (40). 24 Dean, ‘Edwin Parker’, p. 40. 25 Batchen, ‘Vernacular Photographies’, p. 268. 26 Susan Jane Billinge, ‘Melancholia or Delirium upon One Subject Exclusively’ (unpublished Master’s thesis, University of Melbourne, 2013), pp. 17–18. 27 Toby Kamps, ‘Nice’, in Portraits: Luc Tuymans, ed. Joseph N. Newland and Sarah E. Robinson (Houston: Yale University Press/The Menil Collection, 2013), pp. 61–74 (64). 28 Never explicitly autobiographical, Tuymans’s paintings nonetheless reflect the artist’s grappling with his own family history including the fact two of his uncles trained as Hitler Youth in Germany. See Dorothy Spears, ‘Putting the Wrongs of History in Paint’, New York Times, 3 February 2010 https://www.nytimes. com/2010/02/07/arts/design/07tuymans.html (accessed 1 August 2018). 29 Ulrich Loock, ‘On Layers of Sign-Relations, in the Light of Mechanically Reproduced Pictures, from Ten Years of Exhibition’, in Luc Tuymans, ed. Ulrich Loock, trans. Shaun Whiteside (London: Phaidon, 2004), pp. 34–97 (55). 30 Loock, ‘On Layers of Sign-Relations’, p. 38. 31 Loock, ‘On Layers of Sign-Relations’, p. 67. 32 Loock, ‘On Layers of Sign-Relations’, p. 77. 33 Joseph Kantor, ‘The Tuymans Effect’, Artforum International, 43.3 (2004), 164–71 (165). 34 David Zwirner Gallery (Press Release), ‘Luc Tuymans: The Shore, 30 January–2 April 2015’. 35 David Zwirner Gallery (Press Release), ‘Luc Tuymans: The Shore, 30 January–2 April 2015’.

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Subject/object: Seeking the self in Susan Aldworth’s portraits of schizophrenia Julia Beaumont-Jones

The uneasiness experienced by patients on seeing their internal organs  – in X-rays, ultrasounds, scans – has been well documented.1 We may feel familiar, comfortable even, with our everyday physiological processes and sensations, but the actual sight of our insides raises difficult questions, focusing our attention on the mysterious relationship between mind and body and making us wonder just who – or what – we are. In 1999 Susan Aldworth’s health forced her urgently to such a question. Admitted to hospital with a suspected brain haemorrhage, she underwent a diagnostic angiogram in which the blood vessels in her brain were illuminated to reveal potential injury. As she began to think about her condition, watching in real time the workings of her brain on a monitor, Aldworth observed those very thoughts displayed as visual analogues. The brain scan, more than any other internal imaging, served as a compelling medical portrait of herself. The organ responsible for thought, speech, memory and behaviour was itself revealed as a functioning life force. It immediately became the subject of her work, which initially comprised paintings, collages, etchings and collagraphs in which the photographic source imagery of the scan combined with autographic markmaking to form a medical and emotional visualization of the self – the objective and subjective articulated in concert. Aldworth’s work establishes a dialogue between science and human experience, making medical discourses germane for the ‘lay person’ and at the same time acquainting the ‘medical world’ with imagery more emotionally responsive than the unmediated scan as diagnostic tool. The wider cultural resonance of the brain–mind relationship has been explored through a series of collaborations with patients and neuroscientists, stimulating debate and reflection from a range

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of perspectives. Aldworth’s 2010–12 residency at Newcastle University’s Institute of Neuroscience involved working with two artists with schizophrenia, Camille and Kevin, whom she met twice a month to learn about life with the illness and their thoughts about identity. She quickly abandoned her original intention of making representational portraits of them, for she immediately appreciated that Camille and Kevin’s own artwork said more about their personal experiences of schizophrenia than she ever could. As a result her work takes a different approach. These are not portraits of schizophrenics. Rather, they are portraits of schizophrenia, and they invite us to consider how contemporary art treats the broad subject of mental illness. Portraiture of the mentally ill before the twentieth century used a visual language that ranged from diagnostic images and crude psychiatric typologies, against which Théodore Géricault’s (1791–1824) nuanced portraits of ‘monomaniacs’ from Paris’s Salpêtrière Hospital seem like a protest, to the taxonomies of facial expression employed by the Austrian sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736–1783), the exaggerated, sometimes tortured postures of whose self-portrait ‘character heads’ were once understood to testify to his schizophrenia.2 But whether such external signs and symbols could ever reliably capture the reality of a subject’s inner psychopathology remained moot. From around the 1900s, however, the terms in which this question was addressed began to change fundamentally. We can point to several main developments. First, modernism and psychoanalysis provided new tools with which to explore the human condition, as surrealism and abstract expressionism reflected the work of Freud and Jung. Then the formation of Jean Dubuffet’s art brut movement and a new critical appraisal of ‘outsider art’ – made by psychiatric patients outside any artistic school – attempted to rewrite Western definitions of ‘art’ by endorsing naïve invention, unfettered by convention and theory, for its raw purity of imagination.3 Thus mental illness, schizophrenia in particular, became a defining metaphor for the creative mind as it traversed fantasy and reality.4 That ‘outsider’ and ‘mainstream’ art shared a common, broad vocabulary was evident in the work of modern artists; here was testimony not only to the dialogue between them but to the experiential affinities between all image makers. With the breakdown in representational hierarchies, postmodernism has further extended art’s expressive possibilities by validating imagery from all areas of culture. ‘High’ and ‘low’ art meet in the gallery; science has been invited into the studio, as the studio has been welcomed to the lab. And from a different source the rise of art therapy for psychiatric patients has at the same time produced a uniquely informed body of work whose response to the

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experience of mental illness is distinctive, intimate and resonant and has helped enlarge our understanding of it. Today, then, the work of trained artists, medical professionals and patients coexists and interweaves in a complex cultural discourse on the human condition – a condition in which psychiatric disorder is no longer marginalized. It is in this context that we can now consider Aldworth’s works in this exhibition. Clearly they do not perform the traditional function of portraiture – they bear no likeness of the sitter as seen through the eyes of another. External appearance as an indicator of inner life is disrupted and anonymized, and Aldworth also eschews the brain scan – the ‘physiognomy turned inward’ – as she sidesteps her familiar terrain of ‘bio-art’.5 No physical part of the individual is used as a personal signifier. Camille and Kevin’s own experiences have informed the development of the work, but so too have other narratives  – personal, medical, neuroscientific, cultural – from Aldworth’s wider research, as well as discussions with neuroscientists from the University of Newcastle, Dr. Fiona Le Beau and Professor Miles Whittington. Aldworth’s response to her subject is both bold and disarming. With the exception of the text pieces Dreaming Voices 1 and 2, which draw directly on the spoken words of Camille and Kevin, the works contain no discernible biographical elements; instead they reflect on the general condition of schizophrenia. As antiportraits, their use of found imagery – generic anatomical prints from medical folios, the ear as a visual shorthand for schizophrenia and hearing voices – at once interrogates individual identity and situates individual consciousness within a provocatively depersonalized symbolism. These powerful, graphical emblems act as cognitive shortcuts in the construction of a collective experience whose condition we are invited to reassemble. They ask: What is schizophrenia? Is it situated in the brain? What does it tell us about ourselves? The wholesale exclusion of her subject’s own imaged body is a radical departure in Aldworth’s work, and a brilliant conceit which further complicates the mind/body problem of locating the self. Where is the self in secondarysource pictures of the body? Where is the human experience situated in these diagrammatic images? In Reassembling the Self 1–6 and Dreaming Voices 3–5, the pre-imaged skeleton and organs are used to suggest life with schizophrenia. It is through their manipulation, in various arrangements and re-workings, that we find the personal within the ostensibly prosaic. Collaged imagery of body parts, anatomically distorted in various configurations, disrupts the coherence of the objectified body. It is jumbled up and wired differently to standard anatomical mappings – ears, scaled up, are given prominence, hands emerge from intestines,

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the pelvis stands in for a shoulder. The rearranged, distorted textbook imagery reveals a world turned upside down, symbolizing altered perceptions of the self and social environment; and at the same time asserts that the self is ‘the objectified’, that one’s view is mediated by the views of others in society and by one’s awareness of individual differences. For as Aldworth discovered from her subjects, inhabiting the same physical space as others while being in a discrete ‘zone’ of one’s own makes for an uncertain, fractured self-image:  identity is a fragile thing. Photomechanical forms, emerging from dark ink, are heightened with autographic painterly gestures to emphasize the dynamic between the personal and impersonal, the mind and the corporeal machine. In Dreaming Voices 3 and 4, emphatic hand-rendered white flourishes around the skull and ears suggest activity against static bones and organs; these dazzling ‘electrical charges’ from the brain assert the persistence and power of the mind – that is, the restless mind which hears voices and sees deities, which has its own beauty and intensity. These works suggest a spiritual quality in schizophrenia: as Camille describes it, With visual things anything natural looks amazing. I see light energy – I can see guardian angels … It is very comforting, very vivid. I can’t remember what it was like before, but I wouldn’t want these guardian angels to fade away. I believe it is a gift.6

Aldworth’s language for representing these conditions is harnessed perfectly by lithography – a medium which can deftly reproduce photographic imagery amid the most nuanced or expressive autographic marks, viscerally recreating every brushstroke, flick of ink or fingerprint. It is no coincidence that her treatment of this subject was realized in a new medium:  breaking with the nebulous undulations of line and tone of her ethereal etchings and aquatints, she has opted with lithography for a more concrete language that references the dramatic chiaroscuro of oil painting and the mass-produced poster to describe the dynamic between self and ‘other’. Extremes of light and dark, reminiscent of X-ray imaging, heighten our sense of the isolated self, as forms emerge from an opaque, mysterious void. Reassembling the Self 1 and 2 (Figure 7.1), according to Aldworth, ‘could only be lithographs. Their success depends on the intense black of the background – black that you want to dive in to, the black of oblivion.’7 At the Curwen Studio, where she was installed for two months in the autumn of 2011, the lithographs were realized in close collaboration with master-printer Stanley Jones, whose five decades of working with artists there afforded an intuitive understanding of the direction Aldworth wished to take in her new

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Figure 7.1  Susan Aldworth, Reassembling the Self 1 (2012). Lithograph, 84 × 56 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Tag Fine Art.

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medium. The subject reminded Jones of the collage transfer lithographs of Jean Dubuffet, which he had first encountered as a student at the Slade School of Fine Art and then as an apprentice printer in Paris. Dubuffet’s methods seemed to Jones to connect with what Aldworth might explore in her work. But while Dubuffet’s transfer lithographs relied solely on autographic, painterly mark-making in the impulsive vein of art brut, Aldworth’s ability to combine pre-imaged and handrendered forms afforded her freedom to explore the schizophrenic self and its idiosyncratic positioning amid societal norms.8 A key decision was to use fine-grain drafting film, which enabled the collaging of photographic with hand-drawn images and provided scope for alteration as Aldworth experimented compositionally. The medical textbook imagery was already sourced and conceived as a contrast to her mark-making, but there was no plan at the outset for precisely how the two elements would interact or indeed what the prints would look like. Rather, Jones encouraged such decisions to emerge within the studio process: his intention was for Aldworth to develop an intimate understanding of the medium – for her to test its range of expressive possibilities as a means of honing her language for the subject-matter. In addition to their continuous experimentation and serendipitous discoveries, the proofing stages were important opportunities at which to reconsider the direction of Aldworth’s language, revisiting the quality of inking, density of colour and the order in which colour layers were printed to achieve desired effects. Some of the results can be seen in the dark backgrounds of Reassembling the Self 1, 2, 5 and 6 and Dreaming Voices 3 and 4, which in addition to the use of black combine layers of inky blues and purples. I can still remember every discussion Stanley and I had about colour and tone … Reassembling the Self 6 was a particular challenge. I  thought we needed black in the background, but when we proofed the work it was too severe. Stanley suggested mauve, a colour I never use. He was of course right: he is the consummate colourist.9

Nature Nurture 1 and 2, and Reassembling the Self 7 (Figure 7.2) mark a return to self-portraiture as Aldworth examines with a new language subjects she has explored in etching – namely, the fundamental problem of reconciling the mind/body paradox. Juxtaposing photographs from different ‘epochs’ in her life with medical scans and textbook imagery, these lithographs exhibit a boldness unmatched by intaglio printing: they are unmistakably graphic art. The Nature Nurture works emulate posters which, like most mass-published imagery, employ offset lithography. The simplicity of the utilitarian form, apparently devoid of

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Figure 7.2  Susan Aldworth, Reassembling the Self 7 (2012). Lithograph, 168 × 60 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Tag Fine Art.

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artistic artifice, is emphasized by the choice of local colour printed in just two separations – anatomical illustrations in cyan ink, as if applied straight from the bottle, are overlaid onto a brown ‘patterning’ of tendrils suggestive of nervous activity. The scale of these works helps emphasize the dynamic between personal and impersonal, for while the found medical images are typically printed to a size that dominates the composition, Aldworth’s personal photographs retain their original small format, quietly evoking a sense of loss as ephemeral ‘human’ elements under threat from the spectral, mutable body, surviving only in the memories of others. Reassembling the Self 7 also references the personal photograph, but rather than emulating the modern poster it looks back in time to early anatomical study in Europe. Its composition and surface texture are modelled on the Evelyn Tables, four anatomical preparations on wood originally used in the University of Padua’s anatomy theatre during the 1650s and now on display in London’s Hunterian Museum. An impression of wood is given by lithographic crayon frottage, while the depicted body, scaled to life size as two composite prints, emulates the veins, arteries and nerves as glued and varnished onto the original tables. Aldworth’s reference to these anatomical models, originally used for teaching purposes, is a potent symbol of the objectified body of the medical profession in contrast to the subjective embodiment we each experience. Presented horizontally in its vitrine, the work invites us to view it as anatomists of the artist, poring over her constituent parts in search of an answer to the question: ‘Where is the self in here?’ Aldworth’s extraordinary body of work gives no definitive answer. But her lithographs do insist on the power of our uncompromising physiologies to shape the lives we lead, the ways we see ourselves and interpret the world. Her Januslike imagery, both bold and direct, esoteric and uncertain, respects the fragility of identity at the centre of the mind/body relationship. It asks questions – of who we might be and of what we are made – involving us in a debate that is as old and elemental as consciousness itself.

Notes This chapter was originally published in Reassembling the Self: A Collection, ed. Susan Aldworth (London: Cassland Books, 2012), on the occasion of the exhibition Reassembling the Self, Hatton Gallery, Newcastle, 20 September–24 November 2012. It has been reprinted here with permission from Cassland Books.

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1 Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection of the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 7; Jenny Slatman, ‘Exploring Bodily Integrity on the Basis of Patients’ Narratives’ (presented at the EACME, Prague, 2008); and Renée van de Val, ‘Introduction’, in The Body Within: Art, Medicine and Visualisation, ed. Renée van de Val and Robert Zwijnenberg (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill, 2009), pp. 1–14 (2–5). 2 See Stephen Bann, ‘Erased Physiognomy: Theodore Gericault, Paul Strand and Gary Winogrand’, in The Portrait in Photography, ed. Graham Clarke (London: Reaktion Books, 1992), pp. 25–46; and Ernst Kris, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1952). 3 Roger Cardinal, Outsider Art (London: Studio Vista, 1972). 4 For instance, Herbert Read: ‘It is probably true to say that most artists are schizoid’. Herbert Read, Aspects of Schizophrenic Art: An Exhibition of Work by Patients of Mental Hospitals (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1955). 5 Michael Hagner, ‘The Mind at Work: The Visual Representation of Cerebral Processes’, in The Body Within: Art, Medicine and Visualisation, ed. Renée van de Val and Robert Zwijnenberg (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill, 2009), pp. 67–90 (86). 6 Camilla Ormston, interviewed by Susan Aldworth, 2012. 7 Susan Aldworth, interviewed by Julia Beaumont-Jones, 2012. 8 Stanley Jones, interviewed by Julia Beaumont-Jones, 2012. 9 Susan Aldworth, interviewed by Julia Beaumont-Jones, 2012.

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Hiding in plain sight: Gazing at Laura Swanson’s Anti-Self-Portraits Kristin Lindgren

Staring is an interrogative gesture that asks what’s going on and demands the story. The eyes hang on, working to recognize what seems illegible, order what seems unruly, know what seems strange. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Staring: How We Look1 Disability … is a disruption in the visual, auditory or perceptual field as it relates to the power of the gaze. As such, the disruption, the rebellion of the visual, must be regulated, rationalized, contained. Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy2 Laura Swanson’s photograph White (2007) (Figure 8.1) portrays a person, but the image contains no visible face, no gazing subject looking back at the viewer or staring into space. The portrait’s subject is lying in a bathtub, her head and neck resting against the back of the porcelain tub and the mottled white tiles on the wall behind. Only her face and upper torso are in the frame, and both are covered by a white, foamy substance, perhaps aerosolized soap or shaving cream. The only identifying marks in the photograph are a few strands of dark, wet hair, visible above the soap-covered face, stuck to the tiles above the tub. The foamy soap is richly textured, like sculpted frosting.3 The image is striking in its simplicity. White is one of a series of six photographs Swanson calls AntiSelf-Portraits. In each of these photographs, the subject’s face is obscured, her body invisible or only partially visible. The images both draw the viewer’s gaze and resist it. They depict a person, a person we presume to be Swanson, but they withhold much of the information we expect to glean from a portrait. Indeed, they are visually compelling in part because of what they withhold.

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Figure 8.1  Laura Swanson, White (2007), from the series Anti-Self-Portraits (2005–8). Ink-jet print, 20 × 30 inches. Laura Swanson.



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Describing her Anti-Self-Portraits, Swanson writes:  ‘The psychological play between the viewer and myself is what I  am most interested in  – I  am drawing attention to the fact that I am denying something to the viewer. Am I reproaching the viewer’s gaze? Or am I simply acknowledging the moment of recognition? The idea of hiding to acknowledge the act of looking is fascinating to me’.4 White, like the other images in Anti-Self-Portraits, does not clearly depict Swanson’s unusual body. Yet interest in the viewer’s gaze, as well as her photographic exploration of the relationship between the viewer and the image, grows out of visual encounters shaped by her gender, race and short stature. Her ‘acute awareness’ of the desire to look at someone or something unusual derives, she says, ‘not only from personal experience, but also from the history of photography, which is riddled with images of the Other’.5 In Swanson’s series, as well as in her larger body of work, viewers are confronted by their assumptions about and expectations of portraiture and self-portraiture, by their histories of looking and by their encounters – at home, on the street and in visual art and culture – with disability and difference. Many disability studies scholars have theorized the visual exchange between disabled and nondisabled subjects. Bill Hughes argues that impairment, rather than being a naturalistic, pre-social given, is constituted by the nondisabled gaze; he contends that ‘vision is disfiguring’.6 Lennard Davis, drawing an analogy with the Medusa, writes:  the ‘normal’ person sees the disabled person and is turned to stone, in some sense, by the visual interaction. In this moment, the normal person suddenly feels self-conscious, rigid, unable to look but equally drawn to look … The disability becomes a power derived from its otherness, its monstrosity, in the eyes of the ‘normal’ person. The disability must be decapitated.7

Unlike Hughes and Davis, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson emphasizes the agency of the person being looked at and the skill with which disabled people manage the nondisabled stare and shape the visual encounter.8 Situating this visual exchange in an art historical context, Tobin Siebers argues that disability holds not only fearsome power but also an aesthetic value that draws the eye of the viewer. He claims that modern art ‘eschews the uniformity of perfect bodies to embrace the variety of disability’, and ‘turns to disability … as a new and powerful resource for promoting aesthetic variation, self-transformation, and beauty’.9 Siebers develops a theory of disability aesthetics based not on traditional principles of harmony and integrity but rather on asymmetry, fragmentation and variance.

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I am interested in how disability aesthetics shapes portraiture and selfportraiture, forms that both reproduce and reimagine modes of looking associated with physical and mental difference. For much of its history, portraiture has been an elite and conservative genre, one that encodes cultural norms and social status. Portraits of marginalized subjects, such as Velázquez’s portraits of court dwarfs, challenged the conventions of the genre.10 GarlandThomson argues that the creation and public display of portraits of people with disabilities is an ‘act of sociopolitical integration’.11 Indeed, portraits enable us – disabled and nondisabled viewers alike – to look long and hard at human variation without the discomfort or invasiveness of staring at an actual person, and they have the potential to teach viewers to see the beauty and value in variation. Building on the work of Siebers and Garland-Thomson, I argue that disability portraiture does aesthetic as well as cultural work; that is, portraits and self-portraits of variant bodies alter not only how we see disability but also how we see portraiture. Most portraits rely on likeness, especially facial likeness. When we view a portrait, we are most often looking at a face. Sometimes we gaze directly into the eyes of the subject. Explaining the cultural and political efficacy of portraits of disability – and riffing on W. J. T. Mitchell’s What Do Pictures Want? – GarlandThomson asserts: ‘Portraits … have this iconic quality because of their capacity to stage face-to-face relationships with the viewer that capture elements of living interpersonal relations … portraits want to be seen’.12 Aesthetic encounters draw on interpersonal ones, and vice versa. In Staring: How We Look, GarlandThomson offers an anatomy of staring encounters and a critical framework for understanding the relationship between those she terms starers and starees. Like staring encounters on the street, she suggests, interactions between a viewer and a work of art can shape our understanding of disability. Writing about a portrait by Mark Gilbert of Henry de Lotbiniere, a barrister whose face was reshaped by surgeries for cancer of the face, she writes: ‘The effect of the painting is to stage a staring encounter between viewers and de Lotbiniere that makes him seem simultaneously strange and familiar, very like his starers and very unlike them. The painting itself instructs viewers how to look at de Lotbiniere.’13 If disability is an aesthetic value, and portraits often rely on face-to-face encounters, what happens when a portrait or self-portrait of a disabled subject resists, confounds or aestheticizes the eye of the viewer? How does such a picture instruct viewers in looking? How might it be conceived of as an anti-portrait? This chapter explores how several photographers reimagine the portrait by highlighting the interaction between the ostensible subject and the



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viewer – sometimes the viewer inside the frame of the picture itself and always the viewer outside the frame. I focus primarily on the work of Laura Swanson, whose dwarfism influences how she works with and against the conventions of self-portraiture. Before examining Swanson’s projects, I look back at the work of Diane Arbus, in relation to and against which Swanson positions her AntiSelf-Portraits. After discussing Swanson’s photographs and installations, I  also consider, in less detail, Haley Morris-Cafiero’s Wait Watchers and Kevin Connolly’s Rolling Exhibition, which examine the viewer’s encounters, respectively, with fatness and leglessness. Each of these photographers documents or engages a viewer’s interaction with what Garland-Thomson calls a ‘stareable body’.14 Taken together, these photographic projects enable us to explore how bodily difference inflects and redefines the conventions of self-portraiture and how contemporary portraiture revises the photographic history of disability, a history rooted in the medicalization and enfreakment of bodily difference.

Representing disability Variant bodies have always been present in portraiture:  think of canonical works such as Velázquez’s Las Meninas and Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits. In recent years, however, portraiture and self-portraiture projects representing disabled embodiment have proliferated across a range of media. Notable examples include Riva Lehrer’s Circle Story paintings and her arresting self-portraits, Gordon Sasaki’s photographic portraits of New York City artists with disabilities, Marc Quinn’s marble statue Alison Lapper Pregnant, the performance art of Mat Fraser, Harriet Sanderson’s sculptures and the video installations of Corban Walker. Numerous exhibitions have focused on or included portraits of and by people with disabilities. This growing body of work includes iconographic portraits such as Riva Lehrer’s drawings and paintings, which reimagine honorific portraiture by depicting subjects whose bodies are often stigmatized and incorporating symbolic images that signify rich personal and social histories. Lehrer, whose portrait-making involves extensive conversations and collaboration with her subjects, says: ‘My studio practice is an attempt to reverse narrative stripping in the lives of my subjects … think of it as repatriation through portraiture.’15 Harriet Sanderson’s work, on the other hand, turns towards the indexical. Her large-scale installation LIMBUS comprises the apparatus of illness and disability:  wooden canes and chairs precariously balanced on one another; wheelchairs constructed of metal frames, canes and wicker; bedsprings,

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mattresses, pillows and mattress pads inked with the text ‘COME BACK. STAY LONGER’.16 Sanderson explains:  ‘While my images originate in illness and deformity, they are not representations of it. The images are in fact confabulations of daily life, the result of the brain actively engaged in making sense of long periods of imposed physical stillness, or other sensory feedback from within a unique body.’17 Whether figurative, aniconic or occupying a middle space between the two, contemporary disability portraiture often plays with the paradox that disability and bodily variation are at once both hypervisible and invisible. Variant bodies draw a curious and intrusive gaze, but the complex interiority of the subject is often neglected, reduced to a stock narrative about pity, tragedy or overcoming. Portraiture responding to the experience of disability has accomplished important aesthetic and cultural work, giving us new and varied images and narratives about disability and difference.18 The increasing presence of these images in studios, galleries and public art spaces contributes to visual and narrative ‘repatriation’ and animates the reimagining of artistic practices and forms. This chapter focuses primarily on photographic portraiture because photographs have historically played a central role in the representation of physical and mental difference. From the inception of photography in 1839, the lens has been turned on people with variant bodies. The dominant photographic images of disability have been produced in the contexts of freak shows, medicine and charity advertising. Although these images are not conventional portraits, they draw on the visual vocabulary of portraiture. Beginning in the early 1860s, when technology enabled mass commercial production of photographs, cartes de visite (small photos mounted on cardboard) and cabinet cards (larger versions of the same) with images of people exhibited in freak shows were widely sold and circulated as souvenirs.19 These popular pictures were often set in a Victorian parlour, presenting the subject as a recognizable individual in a familiar domestic setting.20 In contrast, medical photographs often eliminate any domestic or individualizing details, focusing starkly on body parts that are of medical interest and presenting the subject not as an individual but as a case study or type. In some medical images, the eyes of the subject are covered, ostensibly providing anonymity but also ensuring that the subject cannot return the look of the photographer or viewer. In others, the face is obscured or outside the frame. Charity photos, images used to raise money for disability-related charitable organizations, often feature the faces and bodies of children, exploiting cuteness, sentimentality and the notion of a ‘normal’ childhood to create an affective response and solicit donations.21 In none of these contexts  – freak



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shows, medicine or charity – does the subject of the photograph have agency or control over the image, which is instrumentalized for purposes of entertainment, clinical curiosity or fundraising. Art photography, in contrast, underscores what Siebers terms the aesthetic value of disability. Yet at the same time, art photographs often incorporate elements of the medical, freak show or charity photograph. Paul Strand’s famous 1916 image of a woman with a large sign around her neck that reads ‘BLIND’, widely seen as influential in defining photography as an art form, recalls both medical images and the begging cards popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Despite the prominence of the sign around the woman’s neck and her silver pin reading ‘Licensed Peddler, New  York City’, however, Strand’s picture participates in a different economy of meaning. The photo is accompanied by no text inviting donations or providing a pitiable narrative; the woman’s body language registers no engagement with or perhaps even awareness of the photographer.22 The image calls attention to the medium rather than the message23 and participates in establishing the medium as having aesthetic as well as documentary value. Throughout the twentieth century, disability continued to be an important aesthetic element of American art photography, most notably in the work of Diane Arbus, Mary Ellen Mark, Richard Avedon and Garry Winogrand.24 Arbus’s photographs, in particular, cast a long shadow on portraits of people with variant bodies and thus demand particular attention.

Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot Laura Swanson says of her Anti-Self-Portraits:  ‘This might be putting it too simply, but the title for this series could have been “Anti-Diane-Arbus”, especially if I wanted to be didactic.’25 Arbus’s photographs have often been read as participating in what David Hevey calls the ‘enfreakment’ of variant bodies.26 Although I suggest that Arbus is responding to practices of enfreakment rather than simply exploiting or reproducing these practices, she was inarguably drawn to subjects with physical and intellectual disabilities, as well as to drag queens, circus performers and others whom she called ‘freaks’: Freaks was a thing I  photographed a lot. It was one of the first things I photographed and it had a terrific kind of excitement for me. I just used to adore them. I still do adore some of them. I don’t quite mean they’re my best friends but they made me feel a mixture of shame and awe. There’s a quality of

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legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle.27

The ‘shame and awe’ Arbus says she felt in her encounters with ‘freaks’ does not suggest a relationship based on mutuality. Her attraction to ‘freaks’ has often been interpreted as a projection of her own psychic pain, a reading that sees only suffering in these images and constructs disability as metaphor.28 But the notion of ‘freaks’ as fairy-tale figures who ‘[demand] that you answer a riddle’ speaks eloquently of the visual riddle posed by people who look different and of Arbus’s interest in how humans look at one another. The freakishness of Arbus’s subjects dominates the critical commentary on her work. In her discussion of Arbus’s posthumous retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1972, Susan Sontag writes: ‘the Arbus show lined up assorted monsters and borderline cases  – most of them ugly; wearing grotesque or unflattering clothing; in dismal or barren surroundings – who have paused to pose and often, to gaze frankly, confidentially at the viewer’.29 Throughout her essay, Sontag marvels at what she finds to be the compelling repulsiveness of Arbus’s subjects. She characterizes them as ‘citizens of the sexual underworld’, ‘genetic freaks’, ‘the maimed and the ugly’, ‘the deformed and mutilated’, ‘the Halloween crowd’ and ‘immobilized in mechanical, crippled identities and relationships’.30 Sontag is fascinated, too, by Arbus’s use of the frontal pose and the direct gaze of many of her subjects: Most Arbus pictures have the subjects looking straight into the camera. This often makes them look even odder, almost deranged … In the normal rhetoric of the photographic portrait, facing the camera signifies solemnity, frankness, the disclosure of the subject’s essence. … What makes Arbus’s use of the frontal pose so arresting is that her subjects are often people one would not expect to surrender themselves so amiably and ingenuously to the camera. Thus in Arbus’s photographs, frontality also implies in the most vivid way the subject’s cooperation.31

Sontag is reacting, in part, to Arbus’s use of the ‘normal rhetoric’ of portraiture to take pictures of those ‘one would not expect’ to wish to be photographed. The visual rhetoric of family snapshots and studio portraits is artfully deployed by Arbus in the service of a very different project, creating, for some viewers, a jarring juxtaposition. Sontag attributes a ‘deranged’ look to the subjects of the portraits. She questions not her perception of them but their self-perception: ‘Do they see themselves, the viewer wonders, like that? Do they know how grotesque they are? It seems as if they don’t.’32 For Sontag, looking at Arbus’s work is ‘an



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ordeal’ that offers the viewer an opportunity ‘to demonstrate that life’s horror can be faced without squeamishness’.33 One might ask: Where is the horror located? In the body and gaze of the subject, the eye of the photographer, the affective and aesthetic response of the viewer? The legendary frisson of Arbus’s images is created in part by the juxtaposition of extraordinary bodies with ordinary domestic or outdoor spaces and everyday activities such as one might find in a family album.34 As David Hevey astutely observes: ‘The “horror” of Arbus’s work is not that she has created Frankenstein but that she moved him in next door! What is more, the freak had brought his family!’35 Arbus’s well-known photograph A Jewish Giant at Home with His Parents in the Bronx, N.Y. 1970 exemplifies this strategic juxtaposition. The photo pictures Eddie Carmel, with whom Arbus was well-acquainted, standing in the family’s living room with his parents. The setting is a working-class living room with unremarkable domestic details: lampshades with plastic covers, a couch and chairs draped with fringed fabric, wadded-up tissues on the couch, a clock with a dangling cord on a side table. Carmel towers over his parents, looking not at the camera but at them. His brown curly hair resembles his mother’s, but his size marks him as dramatically different from his parents. His stooped posture, large, orthopaedic shoes and the cane he grasps in his right hand further emphasize his difference. Carmel’s mother cranes her neck to gaze upward at her son with an expression that might be read as awe or bewilderment. The perspective  – Arbus’s Rolleiflex camera was held at waist-height – emphasizes Carmel’s size and positions the viewer, as well as his parents, as looking up at him. Adams observes that the image recalls the freak show cartes de visites in which giants were pictured with average-sized persons in order to display the difference of scale.36 The disjuncture between Carmel’s size and the proportions of his home further highlights his difference. The harsh flash lighting and square format underscore what the picture owes to the studio portrait and the snapshot. The hybridization of the public spectacle of the freak show and the private nostalgia of the family album animates the image. In most of Arbus’s photographs her subjects look directly into the camera, engaging the viewer’s gaze. In this picture, however, no one looks at the camera; the looking is contained within the frame. The image highlights the viewers inside the frame – Carmel’s parents – and engages the viewers outside it only obliquely. Millett-Gallant suggests that the blurred edges created by Arbus’s Rolleiflex ‘implicate viewers in peeping at the spectacle of Carmel’s body, as if placing their faces against cupped hands and gazing through a neighbor’s window’.37 Although the composition and technical aspects of the photograph

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invite the viewer to identify with Carmel’s mother’s upward, astonished look, they also position the viewer outside the scene and construct the viewer’s gaze as off-kilter and voyeuristic. The tensions between familiar and unfamiliar, public and private, distant and proximate, shape how we look at this photograph. Arbus’s subjects sometimes control or evade the viewer’s gaze through the use of masks. Her 1970 monograph includes several such photographs, some of them taken at a masked ball. In other pictures, elaborate makeup or costumes donned for a drag ball, a parade or a wedding function as masks. One image from the monograph, Masked Woman in a Wheelchair, Pa. 1970, shows an older woman sitting in a manual wheelchair, wearing a warm coat and a blanket tucked around her legs. The shiny, spoked front wheel of her chair is in the foreground. With her right hand the woman holds in front of her face a Halloween witch’s mask with arched white eyebrows, warts, a leering grin showing mostly missing teeth and a pointed hat with an image of a black cat on it. As Millett-Gallant observes, ‘the mask signifies masquerade; a game of trick or treat; and a means to act, act up, and misbehave, while maintaining a certain level of strategic invisibility’.38 Literalizing what Sontag calls Arbus’s ‘Halloween crowd’,39 the image might also be read as mimicking or parodying how some viewers see Arbus’s subjects. The masked woman appears to be gazing at the viewer through the eye-holes in the mask, but we can’t see her eyes. She is, among other things, a figure of the photographer or viewer, looking as long as she likes without being seen. The image is at once playful and scary, inviting and off-putting. It is a precursor, I suggest, of the contemporary anti-portrait.

Hiding in plain sight Arbus’s images, arguably more than those of any other twentieth-century art photographer, haunt subsequent portraits of people with disabilities. Although Arbus’s work incorporates elements of enfreakment, I  am arguing for a more nuanced reading of her photographs, one that imagines Arbus not simply as gawking at the unusual or recreating the spectacle of the live freak show in still photographs, but as drawing on the conventions of such spectacles in order to pose questions about how we look at one another and how we look at portraits. I return now to the work of Laura Swanson, whose contemporary photographs and installations are also concerned with seeing and being seen. Unlike Arbus, Swanson explicitly critiques the enfreakment of bodily difference. Her photographs talk back to Arbus, but they incorporate similar strategies: masking,



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the play of gazes and the artful use of ordinary domestic settings to highlight – or obscure  – variant bodies. When Swanson’s images obscure her face, they incite the viewer’s curiosity and compulsion to look while resisting conventional narratives about disability. Images that obscure her body also draw a curious gaze, impelling the viewer both to (re)construct body and story and to recognize the impossibility of doing so.40 Influenced both by art history painting and by the work of contemporary artists Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, Catherine Opie and Kehinde Wiley, Swanson stages scenes that explore cultural and social identity through portraiture.41 Her project Sitcoms & Romcoms (2005–8) does so by employing conventional images drawn from popular culture. She explains: My first photographic series … depicts my partner, Greg, and myself in staged tableaus of domesticity. They are evocative of promotional TV and film stills because I wanted to portray my everyday life in a fictional, hyper-stylized way to explore anomalies within conventional images of American middle-class life, the desire to look at different bodies, and the ways media culture instills a segregation of normality and difference.42

Cooking shows Swanson and her partner standing at a kitchen counter preparing a meal, framed by colourful ingredients, cooking implements and dishware. Laura, a Korean-American woman about four feet tall, is wearing a white blouse and a vest decorated with red hearts. Greg, a white man about six feet tall, is wearing a beige sweater and a white apron. They are absorbed in their tasks: she is stirring a pot, he is carving a piece of meat and they are looking neither at the camera nor at one another but at the meat. As Swanson suggests, the image is reminiscent of familiar promotional advertisements, but it subtly critiques the normativity of media-portrayed coupledom, in which couples may represent a range of identities but generally ‘match’ one another. Swanson says that this series was influenced by the ‘constant encounters I have had with curious strangers and acquaintances who stop me to inquire about my personal life. These disruptions increased once I  began a relationship with Greg, due to our physical differences. So these photos were my way of critiquing their questions.’43 Her critique depends on the juxtaposition of a recognizable visual rhetoric of domestic life with the visually mismatched bodies of the couple pictured. While the tableaus in Sitcoms and Romcoms satirize a typical consumerist image, the photographs in Anti-Self-Portraits (2005–8) play with expectations of portraiture. As in White, the other photographs in Anti-Self-Portraits obscure

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the face and sometimes the body of their subject, both inviting and frustrating the viewer’s ocular and narrative desire. Swanson writes of her series: These are portraits of an experience – the experience of an artist confronting the issues of exploitation and representing difference, but also the experience of viewing difference. The portraits are hiding in plain sight, so they are less about personal insecurities of the body and more of an examination of the desire to look longer at something or someone unconventional or unsettling, be it a faceless portrait or a small body.44

These photographs pose a visual riddle, but instead of asking ‘How do you make sense of this unusual body?’ they ask ‘How do you make sense of this unusual portrait?’ Coat (Figure  8.2) depicts a dark, narrow hallway, where a brown woollen coat appears to hang above a pair of black leather boots. On closer inspection, it becomes apparent that someone is, in an unconventional way, wearing the coat: while no head or face is visible above the collar, the garment is filled out, and we can see legs in white tights between the coat and the boots. We also see artefacts of domestic life:  part of a bicycle wheel and handlebars are visible in the foreground, with a white plastic shopping bag propped on the handlebars; frames or canvasses are propped against the wall along the left

Figure 8.2  Laura Swanson, Coat (2005), from the series Anti-Self-Portraits (2005–8). Ink-jet print, 20 × 30 inches. © Laura Swanson.



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side of the dark hallway; a window, also on the left, provides a light source. The viewer is invited into a game of hide-and-seek; as Swanson says, the portrait is ‘hiding in plain sight’. Whereas Coat contains details that offer contextual clues to the identity and interests of its hidden subject, Pillow withholds not only a face – the usual focal point of a portrait –but also any identifying details. Pillow depicts a small person sitting in the middle of a large bed, holding an oversized pillow in front of her body. Only her lower arms, hands and feet are visible. The setting is an impersonal, neutral space, likely a hotel room:  the only distinctive details are the red-and-white checked pillowcase and two lemons and a lime on the bedside table. The pillow obstructs our view of the person holding it, asking the viewer to piece together an image of the person based on her small hands and feet. Frustrating the portrait viewer’s desire for a face-to-face encounter and a narrative context, Pillow draws our gaze to hands and feet, parts that stand in for an elusive whole yet signal the impossibility of constructing a coherent picture or story of the subject.45 Like Pillow, T-Shirt is set in a bedroom. Three baseball posters hang above the bed; the bookcase to the right of the bed contains baseball player bobbleheads, a baseball glove and a cap; and a Sponge Bob figure is perched atop the bookcase. Sitting on the bed, leaning against a pillow and the wall behind the bed, the subject is wearing a red T-shirt with a stylized image of a black cat. The T-shirt is pulled up over the subject’s face; only the top of a head and dark hair are visible. A red quilt messily arranged on the bed covers most of the subject’s body. The details of the room appear to offer rich contextual clues: we read the setting as a boy’s bedroom. Because the details are not consistent across the series, however – this bedroom is entirely different than the bedroom depicted in Pillow  – the viewer can’t construct a reliable or consistent story about the subject. In this sense, the photographs function both as anti-portraits and as anti-narratives. They resist our desire. Only one of the Anti-Self-Portraits offers a direct gaze. In Peggy Lee, the subject holds a record album cover with an image of Peggy Lee in front of her face. The cover shows her 1972 album Norma Deloris Egstrom from Jamestown, North Dakota. The album’s title, inscribed in small letters in the upper left-hand corner of the cover, calls attention to the transformation of the person Norma Egstrom into the celebrity singer Peggy Lee and to the artifice and self-fashioning involved in this transformation. The black-and-white cover image shows the face of a woman with a prominent beauty mark, heavy dark eyelashes and light blond hair looking straight into the camera with a sultry, seductive gaze. Her left

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side is partly in shadow, and what looks like a fur coat brushes against and partly covers her left cheek. She is turning her head slightly to look into the camera. The picture gestures back to an earlier era, encoding the ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ characteristic of Hollywood stars of the 1940s and 1950s.46 The ostensible subject of the portrait is eyeing the viewer from behind the mask of celebrity, practicing a kind of visual karaoke in which she adopts the image rather than the voice of Peggy Lee. The mask conceals and replaces the face of the photograph’s casually dressed subject, who is sporting a red T-shirt emblazoned with the words ‘West Coast’, a brown skirt with embroidered flowers and bare feet. The setting, too, is unglamorous:  a room containing a bookcase used for storage, a cardboard box full of LPs, outdated stereo speakers, a guitar case and yellow storage bins with a red rubber ball propped on top. The picture evokes the transformative fantasies of adolescence, made real by the story of Peggy Lee. Like Arbus’s photos, it relies on the juxtaposition of the mundane and the unusual. The stareable sight  – Peggy Lee’s face on a small, ordinary but inscrutable body  – links the to-be-stared-at-ness of the subject with the to-be-looked-at-ness of the celebrity. Swanson is playing with two categories of difference – disability and celebrity – that attract the eye and call for an origin story. By mapping these categories onto one another, she complicates the questions posed by her Anti-Self-Portraits. Despite the pervasive cultural desire for a backstory that explains an individual’s physical difference, we often conceive of difference or impairment as a natural condition, taken in but not constituted by the gaze of another. If the viewer’s gaze constructs celebrity, might it also, as in Hughes’s argument, construct impairment? Can physical difference itself be a form of celebrity, especially when it is on display? In the series Hope, NY (2011; ongoing), which she describes as ‘a compilation of personal “anti-selfies” that were created for family and friends on social media’, Swanson explores the anti-portrait in a context in which everyone is potentially a celebrity, seen and celebrated by countless eyes.47 The series blurs the boundaries between art photography and digital sharing, deploying many of the aesthetic strategies of her carefully staged Anti-Self-Portraits while participating in the informal sharing culture of the selfie. As in the earlier series, the subject’s face is often obscured by everyday objects; here these objects include a square fan, a soap dispenser, a frosted window, a vase of flowers and a Darth Vader mask. Other images show a portion of Swanson’s head or face reflected in a mirror. In the era of the selfie, it is no surprise that casual images made ‘for family and friends’ are also carefully composed constructions of a persona. Swanson’s ‘antiselfies’, however, are less about curating the brand of the subject than about



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probing the investments and desires of the community of viewers with whom the images are shared. Do family and friends want something similar to or different from what a gallery visitor wants from a portrait? How do viewers see an image differently when they have a personal relationship with the subject? These beautifully made digital photos remind us that the intersubjective gaze in the context of social media, like the gaze on the street or in a gallery, involves relations of power, disclosure and resistance. In TOGETHER together (2009) and Display (2012–13), Swanson continues to engage representations of bodily difference while moving from photographic portraiture to installations created from everyday objects. She writes: ‘Anything can be a self-portrait; it does not need to be limited to a photo or a painting … Anti-Self-Portraits caused me to think more about abstract forms of the body, and I  began noticing human attributes in inanimate objects.’48 In these installations, Swanson pairs two objects that are identical except for their size:  a floor lamp and a desk lamp of the same design; a large artificial ficus tree alongside a smaller one; a pair of stools, one higher than the other. In each case, there is nothing notable about the pair except their asymmetry of scale. Allowing objects to stand in for bodies, she is referencing the display of asymmetrical bodies in other contexts:  ‘[the objects] call up the real practice of the theatrical comparison and contrast of different bodies, whether through the historical “freak show” or the contemporary reality TV show’.49 Like her photographic portraits, these installations pose visual riddles. They ask viewers to reflect on their responses to symmetry and asymmetry, to the relationship of one object to another. The use of objects rather than bodies strips the visual encounter of a voyeuristic or intrusive dimension. Swanson explains: ‘In a sense, I am giving the viewer permission to be drawn to and survey these objects. All the while, I  am examining human curiosity and the pleasure in scrutinizing physical differences.’50 Swanson’s Uniforms (2014–15) draws on elements of her earlier work while emphasizing the idea of protection. She has chosen seven figures whose body and face are concealed not by everyday objects but rather by uniforms designed to protect the body or to mark religious or cultural identity. The series includes a beekeeper, welder, fencer and plague doctor. These costumes announce a professional or personal identity even as they conceal the individual body. Each figure is represented in three forms:  a small graphite drawing; a mannequin dressed in a uniform that has been altered to represent Swanson’s short stature; and a photograph of Swanson wearing the garment. Swanson writes of Uniforms:

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I am interested in iconic uniforms that cover the body to protect it from harm, like a beekeeper’s or welder’s. I am also attracted to the serious and symbolic connotations of cultural uniforms, like the burqa or mourning dress. While the work considers an imaginary desire to wear these garments in order to be fully concealed, it also asks the disheartening questions:  If I  wore these uniforms, would people think I had a useful profession or sacred subjectivity? Or, because of my size, would it actualize a detrimental spectacle?51

As Swanson notes, many of these garments are designed to protect the body from harm. Others protect a female body from being seen. For a person with a visibly different body, is there potential harm in the gaze of another? What would it mean to protect oneself from such harm? In the stylized, theatrical photographs of Swanson wearing these uniforms, she poses in a variety of roles and settings. In the portrait Beekeeper, Swanson stands in an assertive pose, hands on hips, her body entirely covered by a white beekeeper’s garment, boots and gloves. She wears a straw hat draped with black netting that obscures, but does not conceal, her face and hair, and she is standing on a walkway in a garden with colourful tulips and a white picket fence in the background. She looks directly at the camera, but the netting mediates her gaze. Despite the concealing costume, a viewer can distinguish her facial features and discern her gender, race and short stature. Whatever the viewer’s imagined perception or actual experience of beekeepers (or fencers or burqa-wearers) these portraits subtly challenge expectations. Since the uniform does not protect the subject from an inquiring gaze, does it leave her exposed to harm, perhaps even more exposed than she would be in everyday garb? Each photographic portrait is set against a stock backdrop, often a dramatic landscape reminiscent of commercial advertisements or Romantic paintings. Swanson located the digital backdrops on Google by searching ‘epic landscapes’.52 In Beekeeper, the garden setting, while idealized, is consonant with the profession of the subject. In other portraits, the role and setting are notably dissonant. The viewer wonders:  Why is a seventeenth-century plague doctor, wearing a fulllength coat and beaked mask, posing on a hill overlooking ocean and cliffs? Why is a Shaker woman pictured against a backdrop that looks like a Utah national park? The dissonance created by these settings contributes to the off-kilter aesthetic of the photographs and to their function as anti-portraits. Drawing the curious gaze of a viewer even as they conceal the body, the photographic portraits in Uniforms explore questions of power and resistance similar to those raised by Swanson’s Anti-Self-Portraits; however, they extend no false promise of domestic intimacy, operating instead in the public space of recognizable roles and generic



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backdrops. Adopting these roles, Swanson asks how the particularities of her face and body are constructed by the viewer and ponders whether a familiar role and costume can protect a variant body from a ‘detrimental spectacle.’ Swanson’s body of work represents not only an inventive critique of art historical and contemporary conventions of portraiture but also an ethical and political intervention in ways of seeing. Her photographs impel the viewer to consider the ethical dimensions of looking: the potential of the gaze to enable or inhibit human connection, to convey respect or to cause psychological harm. Moving from satirical images that highlight the contrasting heights of herself and her partner to portraits hiding in plain sight, from objects that stand in for bodies to a non-uniform body wearing uniforms, Swanson continually explores and recasts the relationship between subject and viewer. In many contemporary portraiture projects, people with variant bodies are depicted frankly and unapologetically, often looking directly at the viewer, engaging or returning the viewer’s look. This approach might be termed the aesthetics of ‘staring back’, a common trope in disability studies.53 Returning the gaze often signifies the agency of the subject, their active participation in shaping the intersubjective encounter and the project of portraiture. Swanson’s work extends and complicates the aesthetic and political work of ‘staring back’. Interrupting or masking a mutual gaze, she artfully deploys the alternate strategy of ‘hiding in plain sight’ and displays the subject/photographer’s ability to refashion the dynamics of visual encounters. In her work, hiding suggests not shame but rather the desire to influence or control the terms of looking and being looked at. By hiding or obscuring a body that might elicit a stare, Swanson redirects attention to the viewer’s response and the vexed relationship between subject and viewer.

The turn towards the viewer This turn towards the viewer, exemplified by Swanson’s work, is also reflected in the pictures of other contemporary photographers who are interested in the visual dynamics around bodily difference. For example, in Haley MorrisCafiero’s series Wait Watchers, the frame includes images of both Morris-Cafiero and of bystanders reacting, sometimes with ridicule, to her generous size and pigeon-toed stance. She explains:  ‘I set up a camera in a heavy-traffic, public area and take hundreds of photographs as I perform mundane, everyday tasks as people pass by me. I then examine the images to see if any of the passersby had a critical or questioning element in their face or in their body language.’

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One photograph, ‘Map’, pictures Morris-Cafiero on a busy city street, looking intently at a map she’s holding in front of her. Morris-Cafiero is in the middle of the frame, and the well-dressed woman directly to her left is looking sideways at her, with an expression of distaste. These photographs are in some sense double portraits; they ask the viewer to engage not only with the subject/photographer, Morris-Cafiero, but also with the strangers who are responding to her. However, Morris-Cafiero’s image changes little from frame to frame: it is the passers-by and their curious looks that are the dominant subjects of the portrait. Like Morris-Cafiero, Kevin Connolly takes photographs of strangers looking at him. For his ambitious series The Rolling Exhibition (2007), he took an estimated 32,000 photographs, around the globe, of adults and children as they first encountered his legless body. Connolly’s body is elided from the images; we see only the bystanders and their looks of surprise, confusion or interest. Born without legs, Connolly has chosen not to use prosthetics or a wheelchair and instead moves through the world on a skateboard, propelled by his hands. He holds his Nikon at his hip, nearly level with his skateboard, and looks the other way while taking candid photos.54 He explains: ‘Because I’m not looking through the frame, I really wanted to push the idea that this isn’t me trying to frame-up a shot and get someone to stare at me; this is just what people are doing.’55 Taking shots from this angle has the effect of picturing his subjects, even small children, as looming over the viewer. Because he is rolling as he shoots, some of the images are blurred. Talking with his subjects, Connolly learns that they often construct a culturally and geographically specific story to explain his leglessness: in New Zealand, he is thought to be the victim of a shark attack; in Bosnia, a landmine survivor; in Ukraine, a holy man and beggar; in Montana, an Iraq war veteran.56 Connolly suggests that human curiosity and staring is an instinctual response that conveys something important about the identity of the viewer: For the same reason we want to know how a magic trick works, or how a mystery novel ends, we want to know how someone different, strange, or disfigured came to be as they are … But before any of us can ponder or speculate – we react. We stare … It is that one instant of unabashed curiosity – more reflex than conscious action – that makes us who we are.57

Like Arbus, Swanson and Morris-Cafiero, Connolly is interested in how people look at one another. Unlike Arbus’s and Swanson’s portraits, however, the photos in Rolling Exhibition are explicitly portraits of the viewer. While Swanson’s work makes viewers reflexively aware of their frustrated desire both to look and to



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narrate, Morris-Cafiero’s and Connolly’s photographs capture people in the act of looking. Variant bodies and their representations elicit a range of affective and aesthetic responses, from Arbus’s ‘shame and awe’ to Sontag’s ‘horror’ to the ‘pleasure in scrutinizing physical differences’ noted by Swanson and the ‘unabashed curiosity’ observed by Connolly. In our contemporary moment, disability aesthetics  – which has always been an element of conventional portraiture – contributes to the development of anti-portraiture through its careful attention to the dynamics of looking and of staring. It refocuses attention on the one who looks. Artists who themselves have unusual bodies draw on their experiences, as well as on the history of picturing disability, to take portraiture and self-portraiture in a new direction. Disability thus continues to serve as a crucial source for artistic practice even when people with physical or mental differences are not pictured. Withholding or de-emphasizing explicit depictions of difference, these pictures compel viewers to look at themselves looking.

Notes An earlier version of this chapter appeared in Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 9.3 (2015). We are grateful to Liverpool University Press for permission to reprint this material. 1 Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Staring: How We Look (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 3. 2 Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (London: Verso, 1995), p. 129. 3 In this regard White recalls Man Ray’s photograph Duchamp with Shaving Lather for Monte Carlo Bond (1924), incorporated into Duchamp’s photocollage Monte Carlo Bond (1924), which depicts the conceptual artist with face and hair covered by shaving cream; for more on this image see Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture, ed. Anne Collins Goodyear and James W. McManus (Cambridge, MA: National Portrait Gallery, 2009), pp. 170–3. 4 Laura Swanson, ‘Anti-Self-Portraits’, Laura Swanson. http://www.lauraswanson. com/#/anti-self-portraits/ (accessed 2 June 2016). 5 Laura Swanson, Mellon Creative Resident Interview: Laura Swanson, 2013. https:// blogs.haverford.edu/mellon/2013/09/10/lauraswanson/ (accessed 2 June 2016). 6 Bill Hughes, ‘The Constitution of Impairment: Modernity and the Aesthetic of Oppression’, Disability & Society, 14.2 (1999), 155–72 (156). 7 Davis, Enforcing Normalcy, p. 132.

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8 Garland-Thomson, Staring, pp. 84–9. 9 Tobin Siebers, Disability Aesthetics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), p. 40. 10 Shearer West, Portraiture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 97. 11 Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, ‘Picturing People with Disabilities: Classical Portraiture as Reconstructive Narrative’, in Re-Presenting Disability: Activism and Agency in the Museum, ed. Richard Sandell, Jocelyn Dodd and Rosemarie GarlandThomson (New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 23–40 (24). 12 Garland-Thomson, ‘Picturing People with Disabilities’, p. 25. 13 Garland-Thomson, Staring, p. 7. 14 Garland-Thomson, Staring, p. 9. 15 Allison Meier, ‘Repatriation through Portraiture: Giving Narrative to Disability’, Hyperallergic, 2013. https://hyperallergic.com/88381/repatriation-throughportraiture-giving-narrative-to-disability/ (accessed 2 June 2016). 16 Harriet Sanderson, ‘LIMBUS’, Harriet Sanderson. http://www.harrietsanderson. com/portfolio/limbus/ (accessed 30 July 2018). 17 Sanderson, ‘LIMBUS’. 18 Garland-Thomson, ‘Picturing People with Disabilities’, p. 24. 19 Robert Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 7. 20 Rachel Adams, Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 115. 21 On the use of children for charity advertisement and fundraising predating photography see Paul Longmore, ‘ “Heaven’s Special Child”: The Making of Poster Children’, in The Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard J. Davis, 4th edn (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 34–41 (36); on the poster child as the most popular image for charity fundraising in the mid-twentieth century, see Bogdan, Freak Show, p. 44. 22 Indeed, for candid shots, Strand used a handheld ‘trick’ camera with a prismatic lens that enabled him to photograph at a ninety-degree angle, so that the subject, whether sighted or blind, was unaware of being photographed; for more information see James A. Knoll, ‘Art for Art’s Sake: People with Disabilities in Art Photography’, in Picturing Disability: Beggar, Freak, Citizen, and Other Photographic Rhetoric, ed. Robert Bogdan (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2012), pp. 129–43 (131). 23 Knoll, ‘Art for Art’s Sake’, p. 131. 24 See Knoll, ‘Art for Art’s Sake: People with Disabilities in Art Photography’, for an overview. 25 Swanson, ‘Mellon Creative Resident Interview: Laura Swanson’.



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26 David Hevey, The Creatures Time Forgot: Photography and Disability Imagery (London: Routledge, 1992). 27 Diane Arbus, Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (Millerton, NY: Aperture, 1972), p. 3. 28 Patricia Bosworth’s well-known biography of Arbus exemplifies this perspective. Patricia Bosworth, Diane Arbus: A Biography (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1984). 29 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Strauss and Giroux, 1972), p. 32. 30 Sontag, On Photography, pp. 36; 42; 43; 58; 33. 31 Sontag, On Photography, pp. 37–8. 32 Sontag, On Photography, p. 36. 33 Sontag, On Photography, p. 40. 34 In 1968, Arbus wrote to a friend that she was at work on a book of photographs with the working title ‘Family Album’; see Anthony W. Lee and John Pultz, Diane Arbus: Family Albums (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). 35 Hevey, The Creatures Time Forgot, p. 436. 36 Adams, Sideshow U.S.A., p. 126. 37 Ann Millett-Gallant, The Disabled Body in Contemporary Art (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), p. 117. 38 Millett-Gallant, The Disabled Body in Contemporary Art, p. 138. 39 Sontag, On Photography, p. 58. 40 Davis argues that both the actual disabled body and the fragmented body in Western art – exemplified by the headless and armless Venus de Milo – lead the viewer or critic to imagine the fragmented body as whole, a defence against the recognition that bodies are always already fragmented. He suggests that art historians have often seen incomplete figures, notably the Venus, as whole, repressing or disregarding missing parts. Thus, images of variant or fragmented bodies may impel viewers to re-experience the psychic work of the Lacanian mirror stage, in which the child (mis)recognizes its fragmented body as whole in order to construct an identity that defends against fears of castration or dismemberment; see Davis, Enforcing Normalcy, pp. 132–47. 41 Swanson, ‘Mellon Creative Resident Interview: Laura Swanson’. 42 Swanson, ‘Mellon Creative Resident Interview: Laura Swanson’. 43 Swanson, ‘Mellon Creative Resident Interview: Laura Swanson’. 44 Swanson, ‘Mellon Creative Resident Interview: Laura Swanson’. 45 The discrete body parts visible in this photograph recall Davis’s argument that images of a fragmented body elicit a defensive posture in which the viewer sees the body as whole. I suggest, in contrast, that fragmented images can reveal the illusory wholeness of bodies and identities, leading viewers to question their fantasies of coherence. 46 See Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16.3 (1975), 6–18 for the origin of the category ‘to-be-looked-at-ness.’

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47 Laura Swanson, ‘Hope, N.Y.’, Laura Swanson. http://www.lauraswanson.com/#/ hopeny/ (accessed 2 June 2016). 48 Swanson, ‘Mellon Creative Resident Interview: Laura Swanson’. 49 Swanson, ‘Mellon Creative Resident Interview: Laura Swanson’. 50 Swanson, ‘Mellon Creative Resident Interview: Laura Swanson’. 51 Laura Swanson, ‘Uniforms’, Laura Swanson. http://www.lauraswanson.com/#/ uniforms/ (accessed 2 June 2016). 52 Amanda Cachia, ‘Resistance’, www.lauraswanson.com. 53 See, for example, the important anthology Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out, ed. Kenny Fries (New York: Plume, 1997). 54 Rachel Beckman, ‘The Lens Stares Back’, Washington Post, 2 July 2008. http://www. washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2008/07/02/AR2008070203220.html (accessed 14 April 2014). 55 Ray Sikorski, ‘A Legless Artist Documents the World in 32,000 Stares’, The Christian Science Monitor, 2008. https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2008/0122/ p20s01-ussc.html (accessed 2 April 2014). 56 Beckman, ‘The Lens Stares Back’. 57 Kevin Michael Connolly, ‘The Rolling Exhibition’. http://www.therollingexhibition. com (accessed 1 March 2014).

9

Filling the narrative void: Material portraits in the Chilean post-dictatorship Megan Corbin

The impact of the political violence of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile in the 1970s and 1980s is still being worked through today; in particular, the forced disappearance of persons has produced a generation of parents, children and friends marked by the uncertainty of unresolved loss. This chapter explores a memory project in post-dictatorship Chile, the Sala de la Memoria (Room of Memory) at the former detention centre the Parque por la Paz, Villa Grimaldi, that represents the disappeared through ‘material portraits’ composed of their personal belongings; it argues that in the wake of the dictatorship’s use of forced disappearance, the mode of portrayal typically used to represent the disappeared has shifted from a pictorial to an object-based approach that uses material things to articulate the absence of identity and fill the ‘narrative void’ left by the violence of disappearance. While the project exhibits many of the same gestures as portraiture, it does not strive for physical likeness but rather turns to an expanded notion of identity (via the life of the material object) in order to symbolize the disappeared. At the core of the portrait tradition is the question of how best to represent a specific individual. As David Martin asserts: ‘everyone agrees that a portrait is an artistic medium that closely resembles a specific human model’.1 Identity, or rather, the erasure of identity, is also at the core of disappearance, an overlap that produces a unique question for thinking about portraiture in post-dictatorship Chile. Martin’s comments may apply to conventional subjects of portraiture, but how might a disappeared person be portrayed in this way? How do you represent a subject whose identity has been erased? John Loughery suggests that a successful portrait has to do one of three things: ‘evoke the spirit or inner life of the individual’; ‘make us urgently desire to know more about the sitter’; or

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‘suggest a wider symbolic connection’.2 If we can let go of Martin’s observation and opt for Loughery’s assertion, then where do we stand in relation to representing the disappeared? Many representations of the disappeared strive to depict these erased individuals through physical likeness, often using photographs taken from their state-issued identification cards. An alternative approach has been to evoke the void of absence by the use of silhouettes; however, in obscuring individual physical likeness, this method risks effacing the particularized person into the collective identity of ‘the disappeared’. As the historical distance separating the present generation from the dictatorship has grown, an alternative means of representing the subject has emerged, an ‘anti-portrait’ of sorts, which rejects both photographic realism and the complete abstraction of the silhouette. Recent representations of the disappeared, especially in the case of the Sala de la Memoria, opt for a concept of portraiture more in keeping with Loughery’s stance, using the former possessions of the disappeared to stand in for their owners, thus constituting material portraits that ‘evoke the spirit or inner life of the individual’. These material representations also make the viewer ‘urgently desire to know more about the sitter’, because in individualizing the persons who disappeared and in striving to facilitate an ‘experience’ of that person and their absence, they call attention to this oftentimes erased ‘black mark’ on Chilean history and motivate the viewer to discover more about Chile’s violent past. Lastly, the material portraits suggest a wider symbolic connection in tethering these individuals to the monumentality of the violence, because they are located in the Sala de la Memoria of the Parque por la Paz that now occupies the former clandestine detention and torture centre Villa Grimaldi. This chapter opens by exploring the notion of disappearance and how it created the unique circumstances for the emergence of a new form of portraiture in Chile. It then situates the Sala de la Memoria in relation to other approaches to the representation of disappearance, arguing that the Sala shows the use of a revised ‘material portraiture’ as a means not only of representing an individual whose current physical likeness is not accessible but also of evoking the ghosts of personal identities, conjured forth through the spiritual life of their former belongings. This new conceptualization of portraiture, a type of ‘anti-portrait’, is employed as a productive means for mourning and working through the trauma of the past by ‘re-appearing’ the disappeared and creating the circumstances for present generations to experience the disappeared not as a collective but as specific individuals who fell victim to the violence of the dictatorship.



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Disappearance and its effects: The narrative void On 11 September 1973, the Chilean military (led by US-backed General Augusto Pinochet) staged a coup d’état that overthrew the democratically elected Socialist government of President Salvador Allende. The coup inaugurated the reign of the Pinochet dictatorship, which would last until 1990. The material and psychological impact of the Pinochet regime’s use of fear tactics, mass torture, unlawful detention, murder and forced disappearance is still being processed today. Shortly after Pinochet stepped down from power, the transitional government of Raul Alfonsín appointed a commission to investigate disappearances and murders perpetrated during the dictatorship. The 1990 report by the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Chile describes the systematic use of disappearance during the first four years of the dictatorship: Detention of the victims was not acknowledged. They were kept in clandestine detention, subjected to torture and eventually summarily executed. Their bodies were disposed of in secret. … During the first months of military rule these ‘disappearances’ were not centrally coordinated. But with the establishment of DINA, the regime’s secret police, toward the end of 1973, ‘disappearances’ became a carefully organized method designed to exterminate opponents considered dangerous and to avoid accountability for such crimes.3

Disappearance during this time was not exclusive to Chile but became a common phenomenon across Southern Cone Latin America. Chile’s neighbour to the east, Argentina, was soon to experience its own dictatorship and political violence, including disappearances. While in Chile the estimated number of disappearances are around two thousand, in Argentina an estimated thirtythousand people disappeared during the regime known as the Military Junta (1976–83). Argentina held its own truth commission (the CONADEP), whose report, titled Nunca Más (Never Again), arrived at five explanatory reasons given for the use of disappearance by the government:  to erase criminal evidence; to create uncertainty and false hopes among searching relatives; to stall investigations into the whereabouts of the disappeared; to paralyse public protest; and to prevent feelings of solidarity between the Argentine people and the searching relatives.4 These findings also help to explain the use of this tactic in the Chilean case. At its root, disappearance aimed to create fear and confusion in the citizenry the government sought to control. By vanishing (instead of openly assassinating) individuals, the government produced a situation of uncertainty

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regarding the dictatorial regime and its victims that remains to this day; this uncertainty is reflected in the essential ambiguity of the portraits that will be discussed in this chapter. Those who ran the concentration camps and detention centres in the Southern Cone believed themselves to be the ‘dadores de vida’ (givers of life) who had the absolute right to ‘dar y quitar la vida’ (give and take away life).5 The exercise of this absolute power over death (and life) was used to discipline, control and regulate a society whose diversity and high level of conflict impeded their establishment of hegemony.6 Part of this exercise was the erasure of individual identities, especially within the space of detention. Calveiro describes the process thus: ‘Los números reemplazaban a nombres y apellidos, personas vivientes que ya habían desaparecido del mundo de los vivos y ahora desaparecerían desde dentro de sí mismos, en un proceso de ‘vaciamiento’ que pretendía no dejar la menor huella. Cuerpos sin identidad, muertos sin cadáver ni nombre: desaparecidos.’ (Numbers replaced first and last names, living people that had already disappeared from the world of the living now disappeared within themselves, in a process of emptying that claimed to not leave the smallest trace. Bodies without identity, deceased without cadavers or names: the disappeared.)7

Disappearance produced a conundrum for human rights activists, including artists, whose work seeks to remember, represent and denounce the violence of the past from the present of the post-dictatorship period. How do you denounce a disappearance when that person’s identity has been erased? When there is no legal trace of the crime? When there is no proof to show? How do you mourn a death that cannot be confirmed? The initial attempts to denounce disappearance were undertaken by relatives of the disappeared; political protests demanding the reappearance of their loved ones were often accompanied by handmade signs that incorporated the photographs from the state identity cards of the vanished. What were once legal proofs of citizenship and existence were now recast as portraits and employed to denounce the attempted erasure of identity posed by disappearance.8 These images have become iconic in the period of the post-dictatorship. In Argentina, they are used to evoke the past presence of the disappeared in former clandestine centres of torture, detention and extermination. At the site of the ex-Olimpo, a former detention centre now converted into a memory site, a mixture of these state identity photographs and family snapshot portraits is plastered onto the windows. The same is true for the former Naval School of Mechanics (Escuela Mecánica de la Armada – ESMA),



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one of the most infamous sites of disappearance in Buenos Aires and now the memory site Espacio de Memoria y Derechos Humanos (Space of Memory and Human Rights). Art installations are periodically displayed here, the portraits of the disappeared enlarged and plastered onto the outside of the buildings of the memory site. In Chile, the Mapocho river, where bodies were frequently dumped during Pinochet’s reign, now houses a memorial on its shores, the Muro de Memoria (under the Puente Bulnes), dedicated to both the disappeared and the figure of Father Juan Alsina, a Spanish priest assassinated by the Pinochet regime shortly after the coup d’état in 1973. Surrounding a memorial cross to the priest are the portraits of nearly nine hundred disappeared, imprinted on ceramic tiles (Figure 9.1). The portraits, again, many of them the former images of their state identity cards, mirror the iconic pictures families used in their protests during the early stages of the dictatorship to affirm the former legal existences of their loved ones, victims the dictatorship refused to recognize. Such portraits hold identity at their core as they seek to force the state and society to acknowledge and remember the individuals who were lost during the violence.

Figure  9.1  The Muro de Memoria, under the Puente Bulnes, Chile. Photograph © Megan Corbin.

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Questions continue to abound for those who seek to represent this specific violence of the dictatorship: How do you depict the disappeared adequately for present and future generations? Can a portrait of a person from before they disappeared truly represent the erasure of their identity post-disappearance? How does society construct meaning in regards to something that officially does not exist? By what method, exactly, do you represent the meaning, the impact, of a disappearance? While the initial use of the state identity photographs served the purpose of proving that the disappeared existed, in the post-dictatorship the task has shifted. The question is now not one of proving that these people existed prior to their victimization, but of portraying the disappeared in a way that facilitates mourning and helps society recognize and represent the depths of disappearance and learn from its legacy. Chilean Cultural Studies scholar Michael Lazzara has noted that the desaparecidos: offer a particularly salient problem with regard to narrating the past precisely because their voices have been silenced forever … Because they are dead, they will never bear witness to the abominable horrors they suffered, nor will they tell of how their bodies were tortured, mutilated, disposed of in common graves or dropped from military planes into the sea. To be certain, they are the dictatorship’s most obstinate legacy: they stand as a marked narrative void in the history of the regime.9

The concept of the narrative void has also been explored by Gabriel Gatti whose book, Surviving Forced Disappearance in Argentina and Uruguay:  Identity and Meaning (2014), departs from the conception of forced disappearance of persons ‘as a catastrophe for identity and language, or, in simpler words, as something that affects identity and makes it impossible for it to be represented and experienced as it normally is in the West, and that dismantles the conditions of possibility that support our strategies of representation’.10 Gatti points to the way in which disappearance shifts the relationship to identity and, in so doing, forces an adaptation in representation of that identity. Gatti’s project resonates with scholarship on the Holocaust, which has paid considerable attention to the role of representation in attempting to communicate the absolute gravity of that history. For portraiture, disappearance calls for a rethinking of the methods typically used to represent an individual. Similarly, in connection to the Holocaust, Jay Winter argues that the ‘degeneration of war into inescapable terror’ during the twentieth century changed the way in which European artistic traditions represent war. For Winter:



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Putting a human face on the Holocaust may be an impossibility, not because the crime was indescribable, but because its enormity seems to have undermined certain currents of humanistic thinking which return to the face as the source of our knowledge of ourselves and others … The Holocaust erased or blotted out that face, that relationship, that recognition. In that sense, it had no face, and thus no meaning. Facelessness is a language of post-Holocaust art.11

Winter’s comments regarding the impact of the Holocaust on the representation of war in Europe are helpful in considering possible modes of representation of the victims of the Southern Cone dictatorships. Winter focuses on the turn to spatial representations in lieu of the face for representing war in the twentieth century; I  propose that we can see a similar pattern in the turn to material possessions as a means for the representation of the disappeared in the wake of the dictatorships. Ernst van Alphen has also explored the impact of the Holocaust on visual culture, focusing on the visual quality of memories of the Jewish Holocaust. Survivors’ accounts suggest that many didn’t (or couldn’t) emotionally work through their memories of events; instead they simply recorded the images in their minds so that they may be passed on at a later time (if this were to prove possible). Van Alphen argues that in order to make sense of such accounts, we must ‘distinguish images as imprints from images as representation’.12 For van Alphen, the link between seeing and comprehending has been radically disrupted in the experiences of the Holocaust survivors. Following van Alphen, we cannot assume that vision leads to authentic witnessing nor necessarily to representation. While some argue that ‘Auschwitz can never be more than a symbol of what can no longer be symbolized’,13 van Alphen calls for a more dynamic approach that can understand Auschwitz as a construction ‘made up of strategies deployed in order to come to terms with this historical reality, over and over again’.14 Van Alphen concludes that ‘although imprints are visual recordings, they are not yet visual representations. Turning these unprocessed imprints into representations that can be affectively worked through is the task of collective memory.’15 Like Auschwitz, disappearance is a symbol that harkens to a loss, a void, an absence, a violence that can no longer be symbolized. Yet, we have seen and continue to see collective memory work that attempts to do just this task. As artists strive for strategies to represent the disappeared, early uses of the physical likeness of the disappeared person – the traditional facial or corporal photograph, the state identity picture or the family portrait – are giving way to

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representations of a different kind, ones that embrace the ‘facelessness’ to which Winter refers, by presenting material belongings as the elements that stand in for the identity of the individual. In the following section, I  will present a brief overview of the shift from the traditional portrait to the ‘faceless’ material portrait in the attempt to represent disappearance.

Representing disappearance through portraits – changes through time In Chile in Transition:  The Poetics and Politics of Memory (2006), Michael Lazzara argues that representation of disappearance follows two strategies: one that marks the presence of the disappeared and one that marks the absence of them.16 The strategies for the representation of the disappeared discussed thus far – that is, the placing of photographic portraits in sites such as the Muro de Memoria – fall into the first category. Other projects have marked the absence of the disappeared. In the Argentine case, the emergence of the use of the silhouette to represent the disappeared was the early counterpoint to the use of photographs by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (one of the first groups to demonstrate against disappearance during the dictatorship) to mark the presence of the disappeared. Ana Longoni has traced the origins of this symbol to an initiative by three visual artists, Rodolfo Aguerreberry, Julio Flores and Guillermo Kexel. The artists traced the life-size outline of bodies onto paper and, on the día del estudiante (day of the student), plastered them throughout the city of Buenos Aires. The full-sized silhouettes evoked the missing presence of whole human beings, citizens who were no longer present and whose voices could no longer be heard. Since 1983 the silhouettes have had a prolific persistence as a visual sign that unequivocally represents the disappeared.17 Argentine visual artists Lucila Quieto and Gustavo Germano have used photography to highlight the absence of the disappeared. For Arqueología de la ausencia (Archeology of Absence) (1999–2001) Quieto created family photographs using archival images of her father, who had disappeared while she was still an infant. Using the negatives of pictures of her father, Quieto projected the photographic image onto a wall, then placed herself in the frame in order to take a new picture. She repeated this process for thirty-five other families; the images are accompanied by epigraphs where the children speak about their parents.18 As Valeria Durán notes, Quieto’s images evoke absence in their refusal to hide their construction through collage: the edges of images remain



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visible, jarring reminders that these are deliberate productions, emphasizing the impossibility of a ‘true’ family photograph in such circumstances.19 Gustavo Germano’s project, Ausencias (Absences) (2006 onwards), recreates old photographs with the surviving subjects of the original image. For example, a family snapshot from 1969 portrays Gustavo with his three brothers, Guillermo, Diego and Eduardo; in Gustavo’s 2006 recreation, there are three brothers, not four, with Eduardo’s place hauntingly vacant. Germano has repeated this process with photographs of other families, evoking disappearance by highlighting the absence of the disappeared. Some projects demonstrate a merging of the two strategies, attempting to convey both the presence and absence of the disappeared. The permanent exhibit of Ausencia y Memoria (Absence and Memory) in the Museum of Memory and Human Rights (Santiago, Chile) not only focuses on marking presence through photographic images but also marks the absence of those for whom no image exists. The 1,700 exhibited portraits consist mainly of photographs of persons who disappeared during the dictatorship, some in black-and-white, some in colour, some close-ups of the face, some full-body representations, some family snapshots, others formal portraits, some from state identification cards; however, interspersed among these images are blank tiles, representing those for whom the museum does not have an image. These blank tiles draw attention to a void of information, so that the installation as a whole can be understood to represent an intermediary strategy, marking the presence of the disappeared by displaying their likenesses, while simultaneously marking an absence by showing those who are not accounted for. In recent years, new forms of representing the disappeared have emerged, suggesting a move away from both photographic likeness and the ‘facelessness’ of the silhouette. Recently, representation of the disappeared has taken the form of the display of personal belongings used to stand in for their former owners. The first example of this strategy is a virtual display by Memoria Abierta, an NGO in Argentina whose mission is to coordinate an archive of the dictatorship. The project, an ongoing online archival exhibition titled Vestigios (Remains), was begun in November 2009 and displays photographs of objects donated by people in memory of the dictatorship.20 While the project’s focus is not solely on disappearance, many of the objects donated are the former belongings of the disappeared (as evidenced by the short texts that explain each object’s significance). The objects in the project thus become symbolic memorial representations of each disappeared person, the conduit through which his or her identity is recorded and recognized as historically meaningful within the archive.

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Another recent example, this time more specifically linked to disappearance, is Proyecto Tesoros (Project Treasures) by Colectivo de Hijos. Begun in 2010, Proyecto Tesoros consists of a webpage with a series of photographs of objects and short videos in which the children of the disappeared (now adults) show the objects from the time before their parents’ disappearance, narrating the significance of each item and explaining what it reveals about their parents.21 As in Vestigios, the object functions as a mode of representation that can articulate both the identity of the parents and their disappearance. My final example of the material representation of the disappeared is the Sala de la Memoria in the site of the former detention centre Villa Grimaldi, in Chile. In what remains of this chapter, I explore this project in detail and propose that it demonstrates how the dominant strategy used to represent disappearance has evolved from the use of a photographic portrait based on physical likeness, through a period of ‘facelessness’ in which the articulation of absence took precedence, and now to the use of the former belongings of the disappeared as a faceless material portrait or ‘anti-portrait’ intended to communicate his or her identity to the present generation via the other life of objects.

Expanding the notion of portraiture: The other life of objects in the Sala de Memoria In The Comfort of Things, anthropologist Daniel Miller argues that ‘possessions often remain profound and usually the closer our relationships are with objects, the closer our relationships are with people’; the implication is that it might be possible for objects to act as substitutes for persons.22 Miller recognizes that ‘language is often defensive, restricted and carefully constructed as narrative’ and, instead, proposes that his study pose its questions ‘to the interior of the house’.23 Miller ponders the paradox of speaking with the material in his study, while at the core of that same study he interviews people in their homes and asks them to speak on behalf of their living quarters: Objects surely don’t talk. Or do they? The person in that living-room gives an account of themselves by responding to questions. But every object in that room is equally a form by which they have chosen to express themselves … these things are not a random collection. They have been gradually accumulated as an expression of that person or household. Surely if we can learn to listen to these things we have access to an authentic other voice.24



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Miller claims that the material belongings of people create a highly individualized aesthetic effect that can be engaged in a search for information about that person; for Miller, this aesthetic is ‘above all a configuration of human values, feelings and experiences’.25 The difference between Miller’s study and the Sala de la Memoria is that Miller is able to visit the homes of the people who appear as subjects in his anthropological ‘portraits’, speak with them and allow them to answer questions and clarify points of contention; as Miller remarks in regard to one of his case studies: ‘To see the bridge between concern for objects and concern for people … requires listening carefully and putting together different stories.’26 What happens when this same scrutiny is applied to the analysis of a collection of the possessions of a person with whom a dialogue is no longer possible? Today, as seen in the examples of Vestigios and Proyecto Tesoros, the location of the effort to return the subjectivity of the disappeared to him or her is shifting away from visual depiction and into the realm of the material, re-signifying an absent subject through the display and narration of his or her material possessions, thus configuring a new means of portraiture. In assembling a pastiche of objects, or even selecting one particular object as emblematic of the disappeared subject, the activism of subsequent generations in the present reconstructs the past and counters processes of forgetting by harnessing the power of the material object to narrate and witness the past. These objects, left behind after the dictatorial regime’s systematic disappearances of their owners have taken place, offer to those that remain an object that facilitates cathexis and encourages processes of working through melancholy, thus permitting successful mourning. Faced with the crisis of representation at the core of extreme violence, of disappearance, such objects have become key in the strategies of representation used to remember and memorialize the disappeared. In the Parque por la Paz, Villa Grimaldi, the only structure remaining from the time in which the property was used as a clandestine detention centre, is a diminutive building that was formerly a guard hut. In 2004, that building was converted into the Sala de la Memoria with the aim of memorializing the disappeared.27 In this small shack, the public first encounters a wall with the now emblematic photographs of the disappeared displayed as a group. The collective mode of presentation is traditionally used to show the scale of disappearance; however, in deliberate contrast to the usually monumental size of such displays (e.g. Ausencia and Memoria at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, which comprises 1,700 photographs), the Sala de la Memoria displays images of

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a selected eighty-four individuals who are known to have passed through Villa Grimaldi. Next to that wall, one encounters sixteen small display cases, each devoted to representing and humanizing a person that had disappeared from that specific site, using former belongings to construct object-based portraits that re-materialize the identities and lives of those lost. The displays in the Sala de la Memoria simultaneously inhabit two time zones, marking the past presence of the disappeared. Seeking to individualize and humanize the victims of the past, they hold identity at their very core. In her analysis of the effects of disappearance on the Argentine post-dictatorship, Elvira Martorell argues that children who lost their parents during the regime are missing not only memories (los recuerdos) but also the lived experience (las vivencias) of being parented.28 The Sala de la Memoria creates the circumstances in which visitors – both relatives of the disappeared and strangers – can not only remember but experience personalities, identities and lives, via an encounter with the objects that were important to the people they are arranged to represent. These material portraits, assembled by the families of the disappeared, use belongings to evoke the essence of the lost subject, offering an experience of that individual as they were before their disappearance. Each case is devoted to celebrating the life of the person, rather than focussing on the abject horror of his or her death. The family of Marta Ugarte Román explain their desire to remember Marta in life rather than in death, and the experience of who Marta was as a unique individual is accordingly staged through the display of her former belongings. These are not just representative of who Marta was but actively participated in making her who she was in life. Our relationships with each other and with the world are mediated by objects: through communication on paper, through the creation of gifts, through a making external of an interior state of sentience. For the family, Marta’s belt – taken from the coat that Marta was wearing when she disappeared – holds together (‘entrelazados recuerdos’) memories that testify to Marta’s personality.29 In Marta’s display (Figure 9.2), that object is made manifest to us, and although the belt is a ‘silent witness’ (‘como mudo testigo’) and cannot speak to us directly, its presence evokes the spectre of Marta.30 This belt can offer a glimpse of who Marta was in life and, what’s more, ‘aquí está’ (here it is) in the present. It is here, it was chosen by her, worn by her, it experienced life with her and now we are able to experience it. While we have the words written by her family to explain the belt’s significance to us, the residue of the past (here, attached to the object), as Nelly Richard reminds us, is a remainder that bursts forth to interrupt the discourse of consensus, to require us to grapple with the legacy of disappearance.31 We want to know the whole



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Figure  9.2  Memorial to Marta Lidia Ugarte Román, Sala de la Memoria, Villa Grimaldi, Chile. Photograph © Megan Corbin.

truth about who Marta was and the belt simultaneously conjures forth that truth and reminds us of its inaccessible nature – we remain in an indeterminate and intermediary space analogous to that of disappearance. This material portrait strives to bring forth Marta by emphasizing her ongoing presence within the objects, the spiritual life of the object evoked to augment the identity represented by the portrait and to permit the experience of who Marta was in life. In her study of objects and mourning, Margaret Gibson argues that ‘we knew the deceased only as the embodied being that they were’.32 For Gibson, the inseparability of spirit and matter grounds the spiritual in the material, gesturing towards what she calls the ‘other life’ of objects.33 Evidencing this ‘other life’, the display text focuses on a button from Marta’s coat, described as ‘supo de sus preocupaciones’ (privy to all of her worries), and anthropomorphized as Marta’s companion on her frequent travels.34 We will never be privy to Marta’s worries or accompany her on her travels, but the button did and its ‘other life’ continues to be privy to Marta’s past even from the present of the display case. The button guards a secret, inexpressible to us, but undeniably there. By virtue of its testifying presence (even as a silent witness), this object interrupts our consideration of who Marta was, humanizing her by conjuring forth her worries. It performs a

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Figure 9.3  Memorial to Jacqueline Paulette Drouilly Yurich, Sala de la Memoria, Villa Grimaldi, Chile. Photograph © Megan Corbin.

didactic function, teaching us about the significance of Marta in the past and calling on us to find out more about her story. Another display in the Sala de la Memoria, devoted to Jacqueline Paulette Drouilly Yurich (Figure 9.3), succinctly recounts the uncertain fate of a young woman: ‘Detenida Desaparecida, a los 24 años, junto a su marido, Marcelo Salinas Eytel, el 30 de octubre de 1974. Fue vista por numerosos testigos de este lugar.’ (Detained Disappeared, at 24  years old, together with her husband, Marcelo Salinas Eytel, 30 October of 1974.)35 This brief introduction to the material portrait avoids dwelling on the unchangeable fate of the collective past. Instead, it shifts to the present tense, continuing: ‘Los objetos contenidos en la vitrina son originales y le pertenecieron. El color y la textura del papel de fondo evocan el chaleco tejido por ella, que se puso al ser llevada a un destino desconocido.’ (The objects contained in this display case are original and belonged to her. The colour and texture of the paper in the background evoke the vest she wove herself and put on as she was taken to an unknown destination.)36 By emphasizing that the objects are original and belonged to Jacqueline, the material portrait implies that this encounter is not simply with a representation of a life, but is instead a commingling with it. These objects are framed as original, authentic, proof: they



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belonged to Jacqueline, meaning she, with all the complex facets of a human personality, selected these objects as hers, as the way in which she would interact with her world, with her friends, with her family. The object is evoked as evidence of the violent nature of Jacqueline’s disappearance:  ‘Los fragmentos, es lo que queda de un vaso de cerámica que ella cuidaba mucho y que fue encontrado roto, en el suelo de su casa, en los días posteriores a su detención.’ (The fragments, are what remains of a ceramic vase that she had cared for a lot and which was found broken, on the floor of her house, in the days immediately following her detention.)37 The other objects evoke the ghostly quality of her vanishing: ‘El género es parte de la funda de su almohada, sobre la cual Jacqueline, si no hubiese sido detenida, habría posado su cabeza esa víspera del 31 de octubre’ (The material is part of her pillowcase, upon which Jacqueline, if she hadn’t disappeared, would have laid her head the night of 31 October); ‘Los hilos de bordar permanecieron intocados en su costurero hasta ahora.’ (The embroidery threads remained untouched in her sewing box until now.)38 By calling attention to Jacqueline’s tactile physical relationship to this textile, and its current state of being ‘untouched’, the display deliberately conjures forth the past presence of Jacqueline. The last inscription in the display confirms the permanence of this presence. It affirms: ‘Jacqueline, tu presencia permanece entre nosotros.’ (Jacqueline, your presence remains among us.)39 By evoking the ‘other life’ of these objects, the portraits in the Sala de la Memoria demonstrate how material objects can be used to depict not only the identity of individual disappeared persons but also disappearance by emphasizing the simultaneous absence and presence of the disappeared. Here, Jacqueline remains present among her possessions, but, simultaneously, the jarring absence of Jacqueline in the present is pinpointed by the knowledge of her disappearance. The horrific legacy of knowing, but not knowing, the fate of the disappeared, the ongoing uncertainty about the past, coupled with the painful continued absence of those who disappeared is a juxtaposition made vividly real by these material portraits. This simultaneity shows the productive value of this mode of alternative portraiture in post-dictatorship Chile.

Conclusion: Material portrait as anti-portrait Disappearance as a strategy of control by the dictatorships introduced a narrative void within Southern Cone Latin America that remains significant today. Efforts to represent, remember and memorialize the disappeared have evolved since the

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return to democracy. While early efforts focused on denouncing disappearance through the use of photographs bearing the physical likeness of the individual, subsequent projects have been marked by an emphasis on the ‘facelessness’ of the individual or by highlighting a lack through the evocation of absence. The disappeared are often defined by their disappearance, that violent erasure serving as the pinnacle of their identities in the post-dictatorship, yet we must also recognize that the disappeared were not born in the moment of their detentions, but were whole and dynamic individuals with life histories, who left a material mark upon the world. Recent efforts have sought to re-materialize the pre-disappearance identities of these individuals in a new fashion, through the employ of their former belongings. If one of the goals of disappearance was to prevent feelings of solidarity among the people, then re-humanizing the disappeared via the facilitation of an encounter with some aspect of themselves represents the ongoing political fight against the goals of oppression. Re-materializing identity strikes at the very core of disappearance, reversing the erasure imposed by the dictatorship. Projects such as Vestigios, Proyecto Tesoros, and especially the Sala de la Memoria, in opting to represent the disappeared through the careful display of their possessions, demonstrate a new and productive strategy for representing disappearance, using objects to render portraits of the disappeared not as the dead but as living beings with vibrant histories. These collections of personal belongings supply an image of who each person was, give clues to their personalities, to their passions, to their beings. In short, they show how former belongings can be employed as a new means of portraiture, one that helps to re-materialize the essence of their identities, to help mourn the loss of their lives and to grapple with the impact of their disappearance.

Notes Unless otherwise stated, all translations are the author’s own. 1 David Martin, ‘On Portraiture: Some Distinctions’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 20.1 (1961), 61–72 (61). 2 John Loughery, ‘Portraiture: Public and Private Lives’, Hudson Review, 52.3 (1999), 439–46 (439). 3 Report of the Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation (United States Institute of Peace, 2002). http://web.archive.org/web/20031004074316/ nuncamas.org/english/library/nevagain/nevagain_001.htm (accessed 15 June 2015).



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4 Antonius C. G. M. Robben, Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), p. 278. 5 Pilar Calveiro, Poder y Desaparición: Los Campos de Concentración En Argentina. (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Colihue, 1998), p. 57. 6 Calveiro, Poder y Desaparición, p. 59. 7 Calveiro, Poder y Desaparición, p. 47. 8 See Sandra Lorenzano’s observation, ‘las fotos de desaparecidos le dicen al estado que los que ahora no están, existieron’ (the photos of the disappeared say to the state that those that now are not here, existed); Sandra Lorenzano, ‘Cicatrices de La Fuga’, Debate Feminista, 12 (1996), 221–52 (227). 9 Michael J. Lazzara, Chile in Transition: The Poetics and Politics of Memory (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2006), p. 101. 10 Gabriel Gatti, Surviving Forced Disappearance in Argentina and Uruguay: Identity and Meaning (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 12. 11 Jay Winter, ‘Faces, Voices, and the Shadow of Catastrophe’, in Space and the Memories of Violence: Landscapes of Erasure, Disappearance, and Exception, ed. Estela Schindel and Pamela Colombo (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 77–90 (79). 12 Ernst van Alphen, ‘Caught by Images: On the Role of Visual Imprints in Holocaust Testimonies’, Journal of Visual Culture, 1.2 (2002), 205–21 (206). 13 van Alphen, ‘Caught by Images’, p. 208. 14 van Alphen, ‘Caught by Images’, p. 218. 15 van Alphen, ‘Caught by Images’, p. 220. 16 Lazzara, Chile in Transition, p. 104. 17 Ana Longoni, ‘Photographs and Silhouettes: Visual Politics in the Human Rights Movement of Argentina’, Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, 25 (2010), 5–17. 18 Quieto’s aim was ‘lograr que, a través del montaje, los hijos de desaparecidos puedan tener una fotografía junto a sus padres’ (to make it so that, through photographic collage, children of the disappeared could have photographs with their parents); Valeria Durán, ‘Fotografías y Desaparecidos: Ausencias Presentes’, Cuadernos de Antropología Social, 24 (2006), 131–44. 19 Durán, ‘Fotografías y Desaparecidos: Ausencias Presentes’. 20 ‘Vestigios’. http://www.memoriaabierta.org.ar/vestigios/ (accessed 16 December 2017). 21 The stated goal was ‘la creación de un archivo que contenga los registros de aquellos objetos y documentos que pertenecían a nuestros padres, detenidosdesaparecidos y asesinados por el último genocidio en nuestro país’ (the creation of an archive that contains the remains of those objects and documents that belonged to our parents, detained and disappeared and murdered by the latest genocide

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in our country); Colectivo de H.I.J.O.S., ‘Proyecto Tesoros’, 2013. http://www. proyectotesoros.org/ (accessed 7 April 2014). 22 Daniel Miller, The Comfort of Things (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), p. 1. 23 Miller, The Comfort of Things, p. 2. 24 Miller, The Comfort of Things, p. 2. 25 Miller, The Comfort of Things, p. 296. 26 Miller, The Comfort of Things, p. 27. 27 ‘Con el fin de recordar la identidad y vida de las personas que murieron o desaparecieron en este centro de detención’ (with the goal of remembering the identity and lives of the people who died or disappeared from this detention centre); Villa Grimaldi Corporación Parque por la Paz, ‘Sala de La Memoria’, Sala de La Memoria, 2015. http://villagrimaldi.cl/parque-por-la-paz/sala-de-lamemoria/ (accessed 15 June 2015). 28 Villa Grimaldi Corporación Parque por la Paz. 29 ‘En la tela de este cinturón están entrelazados recuerdos que son el testimonio de la personalidad de Marta, mujer, generosa, sensible, luchadora que también se preocupaba de darle a su arreglo personal un toque de armonía y delicadeza. Aquí está este pequeño collar que tiene una larga historia de aromas, viajes, tareas políticas, penas y alegrías que siempre compartía con su familia.’ (Within the fabric of this belt are interlaced the memories that are testimony to the personality of Marta, a woman, generous, sensible, a fighter who also preoccupied herself with giving her personal appearance a touch of delicate harmony. Here is this small necklace that holds a long history of aromas, travels, political work, pain, happiness, all of which she shared with her family.) Villa Grimaldi Corporación Parque por la Paz. 30 ‘El significado que tiene este lugar, de sufrimientos y agonías, están impregnados en todos los lugares de lo que fue la VILLA GRIMALDI, ahora PARQUE DE LA PAZ. A pesar de todo trataremos de exponer con estos pequeños objetos, dar a conocer a una mujer que entregó su vida en tan trágicas circunstancias solo por tener ideales. Recordar lo que fue en vida MARTA, es como tejer una fina tela abrigadora, cálida, eterna que nos da pena sacar. Ver y tocar este CINTURÓN que era del abrigo con que desapareció el 9 de agosto de 1976, está ahora aquí como mudo testigo.’ (The significance that this place holds, one of suffering and agony, is imprinted in all of the corners of what was Villa Grimaldi, now the Park for Peace. Despite everything, we have tried to showcase through these small objects, to introduce people to a woman who gave her life in such tragic circumstances just for having her ideals. Remembering who in life was MARTA is like weaving a fine tapestry, warm, eternal, one that pains us to remove. Seeing and touching this BELT that was from the coat she had on when she disappeared the 9th of August of 1976, is now here as a silent witness). Villa Grimaldi Corporación Parque por la Paz.



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31 Nelly Richard, Cultural Residues: Chile in Transition, trans. Allan West, Theodor Quester and Jean Franco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). 32 Margaret Gibson, Objects of the Dead: Mourning and Memory in Everyday Life (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2008), p. 9. 33 Gibson, Objects of the Dead, p. 10. 34 ‘Entre las curiosidades que Marta guardaba está este BOTÓN que era de su gamulán y que, supo de sus preocupaciones, de sus largos viajes en que conoció otros países, idiomas, personas y por supuesto todas las bellezas de nuestro país.’ (Among the curiosities that Marta kept is this BUTTON, which was from her sheepskin coat and that knew of her worries, of her long trips in which she got to know other countries, languages, people, and of course all of the beauties of our own country.) Villa Grimaldi Corporación Parque por la Paz. 35 Villa Grimaldi Corporación Parque por la Paz. 36 Villa Grimaldi Corporación Parque por la Paz. 37 Villa Grimaldi Corporación Parque por la Paz. 38 Villa Grimaldi Corporación Parque por la Paz. 39 Villa Grimaldi Corporación Parque por la Paz.

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Relics, remains and other objects: Non-mimetic portraiture in the age of AIDS Fiona Johnstone

Can an object perform the work of a portrait, and under what circumstances might it do so? This chapter argues that the AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) crisis of the 1980s and 1990s occasioned a new mode of portraiture based on objects rather than images, evoking its subject through analogy, metaphor and trace rather than direct depiction. Conventionally understood, a portrait of a person should communicate something about their outward appearance, interior essence or social identity.1 The works examined in this chapter all challenge that definition: they are unconcerned with likeness (physical or otherwise), and while identity is a central concern, it is addressed here primarily in a collective sense, challenging portraiture’s long-standing associations with the uniqueness of the individual.2 Given this, it might seem contentious to describe such works as portraits. Nonetheless, all fulfil the most basic definition of portraiture, set out by Richard Brilliant in his classic introductory account as ‘art works, intentionally made of living or once living people by artists, in a variety of media, and for an audience’.3 In many of these works, the artist’s intention to represent a once-living person is asserted through the choice of title:  in others, it is signalled through the discursive framing of the work. This chapter focuses on the significance of secular relics for object-based portraiture, looking at the deployment of human relics and remains as surrogate portraits, and the use of what Cynthia Hahn describes as the ‘reliquary effect’ to engage other objects in the representation or evocation of a human subject.4 Accordingly, the first section of the chapter establishes the theoretical terrain by detailing the significance of relics and relic strategies for portraiture. This is followed by a contextual section on representation and AIDS, outlining the

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reasons why some artists responded to the AIDS crisis by adopting an abstract, object-based mode of portrayal instead of using a direct pictorial approach. The remainder of the chapter explores a series of case studies, selected as significant examples of relic-based portraiture:  Barton Lidice Beneš’s Brenda (1994) and Reliquarium (1999); Robert Blanchon’s self-referential installation gum, waste, indentations, stains and envelopes (1996); and Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled” [Portrait of Ross in L.A.] (1991).

Relics and portraiture Deriving from the Latin reliquiae or ‘remains’, the relic is typically thought of as a fragment of bone or other bodily vestige of a holy person, although it may also consist of non-corporeal matter that has been proximate to the sacred, such as cloth, dust or splinters of wood. However, as Hahn points out, the materiality of the relic is less significant than the processes of identification, collection and framing (including ritual, narrative and the placing of the relic in a suitable container or reliquary), through which the relic is constructed.5 The relic ultimately depends on active participation rather than passive spectatorship, allowing Hahn to draw a parallel between the historical use of relics (in both religious and secular contexts) and recent practices of socially engaged or relational art.6 Hahn claims that the reliquary effect can be a ‘powerful tool in socially engaged discourses of contemporary art’, allowing contemporary artists to explore a series of issues, including the ‘problem’ of the body, questions of personal and national history, and the processing of memories of traumatic events (Hahn suggests war and genocide, but her points are equally applicable to the AIDS epidemic).7 The portrait is typically understood as an iconographic representation: a sign that refers to something by providing a likeness or resemblance. The relic, on the other hand, is an index, with a direct physical connection to the person or object that it represents. Both portrait and relic maintain a delicate equipoise between a sense of wholeness and presence on the one hand and incompleteness and absence on the other hand. The portrait offers the illusion of presence, its visually unified appearance allowing the viewer to disavow the real-life absence of the sitter. The indexical power of the relic is thought to guarantee the actual, authentic presence of its holy referent, yet its fragmentary form serves as a reminder of its necessary incompleteness.8 As I  shall argue presently, when engaged as a portrait, the relic foregrounds the absence of the sitter and is thus



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able to resist the recuperative suggestion of wholeness that usually accompanies a portrait; this is a particularly significant manoeuvre for memorial portraiture, the sub-genre that is under consideration in this chapter. Although ‘stubbornly material’, relics are able to ‘act and operate in the world’;9 accordingly, the category of the relic has been significant for the ‘material turn’ of the late 1990s, when scholars began to explore objects as active entities with ‘lives of their own, with stories to tell and voices to tell them’.10 Simultaneously ‘persons’ and ‘things’, relics are ontologically unstable:  far from being inert objects, they are often conceived as active social agents, both in the past and in the present day – for example, the physical remains of saints might be petitioned for assistance with the problems of the living. Portraits are similarly slippery: they are ‘things’ which (usually) look like people and are sometimes responded to as if they were ‘real’ people as well. For example, Joanna Woodall writes that during the sixteenth century, aristocratic and court portraits were understood as direct substitutes for their sitters; used to arrange dynastic marriages or disseminate the image of sovereign power, these portraits were assumed to elicit the reverence due to their noble sitters.11 A more contemporary illustration might be the common act of kissing, caressing or keeping close an image of a loved one; in a short story that attests to the potentially erotic nature of this relationship, photographer Hervé Guibert keeps a picture of a handsome young man initially in his bed and later bound with tape directly against his skin.12 Relic-like objects can convey a similarly suggestive charge: artist Barton Lidice Beneš talks about human ashes as though they were capable of amatory pleasure, and the erotic valences of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s installation “Untitled” [Portrait of Ross in L.A.] have been noted by more than one commentator.13 The qualities of the (indexical) relic and the (iconographic) portrait come together in the analogue portrait photograph, where the image is registered by rays of light which have literally ‘touched’ the body of the sitter, to cite Roland Barthes’s poetic description in Camera Lucida.14 The photograph is the ultimate secular relic, often used in mourning rituals (e.g. during a funeral a photograph may physically ‘stand in’ for the deceased). Given this, it is unsurprising that photography has played an important role both in memorializing those lost to AIDS and in visually constructing AIDS as a social and cultural phenomenon.15 However, perhaps due in part to its very influence in shaping public opinion about AIDS, photographic portraiture was considered by some critics to be a particularly problematic mode of representation, prone to objectifying its sitters and perpetuating damaging stereotypes. As the next section of this chapter will argue, the perceived shortcomings of photographic representation were one of

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a number of factors that made exploring alternative modes of portraiture all the more pressing at this particular moment.

Representing AIDS, rethinking portraiture The first cases of AIDS were reported in 1981. Pictures of individuals with AIDS-related illnesses rarely appeared in the press before the mid-1980s; the naming of the film star Rock Hudson as a person with AIDS in 1985 is generally considered to be a turning point in journalistic interest in the epidemic. As the media sought to ‘put a face to AIDS’, a recognizable sub-genre of AIDS ‘victim’ portraiture emerged, typically characterized by photographic images of wasted young men disfigured by lesions, helplessly awaiting their premature deaths. Subsequent pictures by photographers such as Nicholas Nixon (whose Tom Moran series from the project Portraits of People with AIDS was exhibited at New  York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1989, making it one of the earliest examples of AIDS portraiture to be shown inside a major museum space) merely reiterated a similar set of visual clichés, as critics and activists Douglas Crimp and Jan Zita Grover observed.16 An alternative stereotype was later provided by the AIDS ‘hero’ of activist literature, a street-fighting guerrilla who was ‘surviving and thriving’ despite (or perhaps because of) his positive sero-status.17 Although offering a more hopeful depiction of life with HIV and AIDS, this figure was also criticized for being overly aspirational and thus potentially alienating. By the close of the 1980s, existing representations were polarized between victim and hero; artists wishing to present a more nuanced exploration of AIDS were thus compelled to create their own visual language. While many continued to work within the field of pictorial representation (including photography), others perceived the photographic medium to be overly problematic and so turned towards non-mimetic forms of expression. Douglas Crimp’s important analysis of early AIDS portraiture, ‘Pictures of People with AIDS’ (first delivered as a conference paper in 1989),18 was heavily influenced by postmodern critiques of photography and photographic portraiture, best exemplified by two well-known texts by Allan Sekula. In ‘Dismantling Modernism’ (1978), Sekula accuses selected documentary portrait photographers of using the genre in order to foreground their own artistic subjectivity, memorably describing the relationship between photographer and sitter in predominantly negative terms as a ‘seduction, coercion, collaboration or rip-off ’.19 In ‘The Body and the Archive’ (1986), Sekula traces a dual genealogy



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for portraiture, which draws on the one hand from the honorific tradition of portrait painting and on the other hand from a problematic history (primarily photographic) of identifying and regulating criminal, deviant or non-normative bodies.20 Looking through photography’s ‘shadow archive’ of images of ‘the poor, the diseased, the insane, the criminal, the non-white, the female, and all other embodiments of the unworthy’, Sekula suggests that every photographic portrait necessarily takes place within a social and moral hierarchy.21 Tainted by its associations with physiognomy, phrenology and ultimately a discourse of eugenics, for Sekula, photographic portraiture comes to establish and delimit the terrain of ‘the other’. For artists and theorists (such as Crimp) who shared Sekula’s critical position, the troubling historical associations of photographic portraiture created obvious challenges for those seeking to produce meaningful and balanced representations of people with AIDS. A third factor influencing the turn towards non-mimetic portraiture was the problem of censorship in the context of the ‘culture wars’ of the 1990s.22 Jonathan Katz has convincingly argued that AIDS actively changed American art, compelling a generation of artists to ‘think about their representational practices first and foremost strategically, trying to understand the array of forces marshalled against them and seeking to circumvent, confront, or flout a series of newly codified prohibitions against any representation of AIDS or same sex desire’.23 As Katz acknowledges, many artists felt unable to directly address contentious AIDS-related issues such as homosexuality and so turned towards more oblique modes of expression, ultimately resulting in a reconsideration of where the limits of portraiture might lie. In this section I have suggested that a number of factors were at play in the turn towards a non-mimetic, object-based portraiture in response to AIDS: first, the need to avoid the visual stereotypes of the AIDS ‘victim’; second, a critical discomfort with the darker side of the history of photographic portraiture; and third, the necessity of circumventing potential censorship in relation to provocative subject-matter. The decisions made by artists working in response to AIDS also reflect broader trends in portrait abstraction in the late twentieth century, including a desire to explore the critiques of the construction of the subject carried out by French theorists from the late 1960s through to the late 1980s. Texts by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault posited a self that was no longer essential, stable and bounded but instead constructed, conditional and in constant flux.24 As Anne Collins Goodyear writes in her essay ‘On the Birth of the Subject and the Defacement of Portraiture’, portraiture produced in direct or indirect response to these ideas ‘constructs a self that is not absolute,

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but contingent, grounded not in appearance but in the evocation of a presence, not demanding recognition so much as acknowledgment, not imposing one mode of being, but, rather, manifesting an openness to reconsideration and reformulation in the eyes of its other: the audience’.25 The works examined in the following pages of this chapter fulfil Goodyear’s definition of expanded portraiture to the letter, evoking rather than depicting, suggesting rather than describing, and setting up a reciprocal relationship between beholder and art object.

Remains: Barton Lidice Beneš’s Brenda Barton Lidice Beneš’s installation Brenda (1994) (Figure 10.1) comprises nearly two hundred facsimile AIDS awareness ribbons, twisted out of heavy paper, slicked with glue and crusted with human ashes. Installation images from the 1996 UK exhibition Brenda and Other Stories show the re-contextualized ribbons pinned to the gallery wall like brittle grey butterflies, ordered into formal lines

Figure 10.1  Barton Lidicé Beneš, Brenda (detail) (1993). Two hundred 4-inch-high ribbons encrusted in cremation ashes and brass plaque, installation dimensions variable. Collection of International Collage Collection at Mount Holyoke College Art Museum. Courtesy the Estate of Barton Lidicé Beneš and Pavel Zoubok Gallery, New York.



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above a plaque bearing the words: ‘The Cremated Remains of Brenda Woods. Born July 5 1947. Died November 1, 1989.’26 Described as ‘serene, beautiful, almost organic and fossil-like’,27 the work draws its unsettling power from the use of human remains to stand in for a once-living person. The subject of the portrait, Brenda Woods, was the sister of a friend of the artist; the New  York Times described her as ‘a troubled Harlem mother who contracted HIV through injecting heroin’.28 As Beneš recalls, Brenda was fearful that she would not be buried because of her HIV status and that no-one would remember her.29 She asked Beneš to use her ashes (ultimately donated by her brother) to honour her memory. The work had previously been exhibited in a group show at the non-profit art space White Columns in New York in April 1993, where it had been catalogued as The Cremated Remains of Brenda; the shift from the descriptive title to a nomenclative one actively transforms Brenda into a portrait, by signalling the artist’s intention for it to be understood as such. In Richard Brilliant’s Portraiture, intentionality is one of the defining features of the portrait: drawing on Hans Georg Gadamer’s essay, ‘Plato as Portraitist’ (1988), Brilliant argues that a portrait’s claim to significance lies in the intended relation of the portrait to the human original; it is thus the artist who establishes the category of ‘portrait’.30 ‘The very fact of the portrait’s allusion to an individual human being, actually existing outside the work,’ Brilliant writes, ‘defines the function of the artwork in the world and constitutes the cause of its coming into being.’31 However, Brenda also challenges a number of the operations of portraiture as outlined by Brilliant. In Brilliant’s account, the portrait artist must attempt to answer three questions: What does the sitter look like (likeness)? What are they like (essence)? and Who are they (social identity)?32 Brenda does not reveal anything about its subject: we know nothing about her appearance or her personality nor are we offered any social markers such as details of her profession or her marital status, for example. Instead, Brenda eschews portraiture’s traditional emphasis on the face to focus on the visceral materiality of its subject’s body and to highlight that body’s diminishment. If a portrait makes ‘the absent presence [and] the dead seem alive’,33 then Brenda makes the absence of its referent painfully tangible, drawing our attention to the reduced nature of a person after their passing, those attributes typically referred to by a portrait all rendered irrelevant by the equalizing effects of death. Ashes are simultaneously generic (one person’s ashes look more or less similar to another’s) and, as the physical index of a specific person, highly individualized. Beneš clearly found ashes an evocative medium, incorporating

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them into several works. Observing the remains of a number of friends, he noted individual variations in texture and hue, musing, ‘Is it temperature? Diet? It’s something in the bones.’34 The three-foot high Hourglass (1996) is filled with the cremated remains of two lovers, Noel McBean and James Barden, who, inspired by Brenda, had requested that Beneš turn them into an artwork after their passing. Beneš describes mixing the two men’s remains as ‘very private’, intimate and even erotic, ‘sort of like watching two people have sex’; his comments hark back to a nineteenth-century Romantic tradition of sensual re-unification after death.35 In contrast to the corpse, which bears a physical resemblance to the dead but which is also highly unstable (being prone to decomposition and putrefaction), cremation affords the deceased a ‘new’ body which is durable and beyond further deterioration.36 This symbolic body is fluid and formless, capable of being scattered to the winds, strewn on the ground or dispersed on the tide, able to participate in the world and ‘to both transcend and condense the particularities of their previous bodily life’.37 The ability of cremation ashes to signify a particularized subject while transcending the limits of a specific body is highly suggestive for a mode of expanded portraiture that seeks to both memorialize an individual and make claims on behalf of a broader community. Writing in relation to the 1994 exhibition Face-Off, Melissa Feldman proposed that the portrait could be separated from its links with the individual subject and reimagined as ‘an accumulation of its ethnocultural and socio-political circumstances’. Her rethinking of the portrait provides a useful framework for considering Brenda, as well as other works that will be explored later in this chapter: the figure is replaced by object based, sculptural or environmental assemblage. By posing as a symbol of a larger community, the portrait is forced out of its figural domain and into a body of evidence.38

Using its indexical status to stake an evidentiary claim, Brenda presents an articulation of AIDS as a collective crisis, thus transcending its implied status as a portrait of a single individual. This is achieved partly through its formal structure, the ashes of one person divided among almost two hundred ribbons, their regimented group formation evoking the mass devastation of military graves. Through Brenda, Beneš also expresses a critique of the red ribbon, which over a short period had been transformed from radical protest symbol to inoffensive ubiquitous emblem.39 A  1993 article in the New  York Times announced a ‘backlash’ again the red ribbon, citing as evidence Beneš’s recent show at White Columns: ‘I absolutely hate those red ribbons,’ Beneš is quoted as



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saying. ‘They are doing nothing. Everyone wants to do the right thing, but they wear it and that’s as far as it goes.’40 Through Brenda, Beneš uses the ribbon to re-present the grim bodily reality of AIDS. The uses of ashes – a viscerally ‘present’ material – alludes to ACT UP’s first ‘ashes action’ of October 1992, when AIDS activists scattered human ashes across the lawn of the White House in a radical protest designed to show the full human cost of the epidemic. ‘Bring your grief and rage about AIDS to a political funeral in Washington D.C.’ announced a flyer publicizing the action, inviting potential participants to carry the ‘actual ashes’ of loved ones in procession to the White House, where ‘in an act of grief and rage and love, we will deposit their ashes on the White House Lawn’.41 Previously ACT UP’s visually sophisticated demonstrations had deployed representations of death, such as fake coffins, mock tombstones and blood-red paint; recognizing that mere simulacra were no longer enough, the ashes action raised the stakes by mobilizing the real bodies of the dead, assumed to be more eloquent than any creative or metaphorical depiction. A poetic response to the ashes action, Brenda is not only a portrait of an individual but also a reaction to a particularized set of social and cultural circumstances. As a memorial, it not only bears witness to the life of a specific person but also places that person in a broader context; namely, one of symbolic gestures but lack of meaningful action on the part of policymakers and other influential personages. One might also note that the relative invisibility of Brenda in her own portrait echoes her comparative lack of visibility in life; not only as a person with AIDS, nor just as a drug user, but specifically as a woman with AIDS, when, as scholars such as Cindy Patton have noted, women have typically been under-represented in medical, political and popular media constructions of AIDS.42 Brenda’s invisibility in death, as in life, is powerfully attested to by the aniconic format of Beneš’s portrait.

Relics: Barton Lidice Beneš’s Reliquarium Like Brenda, Beneš’s Reliquarium (1999) (Figure 10.2) is both a memorial for an individual and a collective portrait of a community; also like Brenda, it draws on a metaphysics of the real, incorporating bodily traces as both personal memory and empirical evidence. Beneš’s Reliquarium can be read as a portrait gallery in miniature, a diminutive museum dedicated to the material remnants of friends lost to the epidemic. The desire to preserve these fragments developed out of Beneš’s own experience of personal loss:

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Figure  10.2  Barton Lidicé Beneš, Reliquarium (1999). Mixed-media assemblage, 8 × 50 × 2¾ inches. Collection of International Collage Collection at Mount Holyoke College Art Museum. Courtesy the Estate of Barton Lidicé Beneš and Pavel Zoubok Gallery, New York. I have always been afraid of losing things. Then I lost Howard. In 1989 he died here in our apartment – I’d put a hospital bed in the studio. At the moment of his death, fluid came from his nose and I grabbed a piece of cotton to clean it off. Then, that night, there was the commotion of doctors and funeral arrangements, and I went to stay at a neighbor’s apartment. The next morning when I came back to the studio, I saw that another friend had cleaned up in my absence, and removed the bed, but where the bed had been was that piece of cotton lying on the floor. I started to throw it away and then I couldn’t. It became him.43

The cotton now resides in Beneš’s Reliquarium, which consists of a shallow wooden box, forty-eight by fifty inches, divided into sixty-four compartments,



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each of which is filled with a small item that has been hand-labelled and neatly mounted on card. The wad of cotton is preserved in a tiny circular Perspex container and identified as ‘cotton used to wipe the face of Howard Meyer after he died, July 10, 1989’. Beneš has explicitly compared his Reliquarium to the AIDS Memorial Quilt, observing that Howard’s piece of cotton ‘filled one of the boxes, like a panel in the quilt’.44 Many panels in the Quilt incorporate pictorial portraits (often in the form of photographs of the deceased) and personal relics (‘shirts and ties, teddy bears, crushed beer cans, merit badges and credit cards, … leather and lame, wedding rings, cremation ashes’); each panel thus represents a ‘snapshot of the soul’ and indeed might be said to function both as portrait and relic.45 If the Quilt is a ‘collective portrait of contemporary America’,46 as Erika Doss has observed, then Beneš’s Reliquarium, in addition to being a personal mausoleum for the remains of his lover, is also, like Brenda, a collective portrait of the AIDS epidemic. The box is a containing device that is itself contained, framed with a collage of media texts and images alluding to the epidemic. Each of the items placed in the box is associated with AIDS. Sometimes the connection is clear: for instance, a used plaster is labelled ‘Kevin O’Leary’s first HIV test, February 11, 1999, New  York City’; further examples include fragments from ACT UP actions, samples of AIDS medications and scraps of panels from the AIDS Memorial Quilt. Elsewhere the relationship is less obvious: examples include the sole from Elizabeth Taylor’s shoe (Taylor was an early support of AIDS charities) or a fragment from the ruins of the Mineshaft (one of New York’s celebrated 1980s gay sex clubs). The overall effect is fascinating, suggesting a twisted variation on a Victorian collector’s cabinet or a darker version of Joseph Cornell’s glassfronted ‘shadow boxes’. Beneš’s affiliation with relics and reliquaries is often attributed to biographical detail: a second-generation Czech immigrant, as a child Beneš and his mother lived in Queens with his Czech-born grandparents, who were immersed in the Roman Catholic tradition of honouring the remains of saints. Arguably, this heritage enabled Beneš to develop a powerful visual strategy with which to address issues of personhood and embodiment, memorialization and representation in relation to AIDS. For example, Beneš’s cotton scrap can be read as a secular updating of the legend of the sudarium of St Veronica; in the Bible story, St Veronica compassionately pressed a cloth against Christ’s face and found his true image imprinted on the fabric.47 One of the earliest examples of portraiture, Saint Veronica’s cloth is simultaneously icon and index, its

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indexical quality guaranteeing the iconographic accuracy and authenticity of the representation. Unlike the sudarium, however, Beneš’s ‘portrait’ of Howard eschews iconographic resemblance and focuses entirely on the indexical trace as a site for the evocation of the sitter. Writing in relation to another cloth-based relic, the Turin shroud, Georges Didi-Huberman has argued that it is actually the non-iconic, non-mimetic nature of the stain that guarantees its indexical value; Huberman also points out that ‘authenticity’ is common to the vocabulary that Charles Sanders Peirce uses to describe the index.48 Ernst van Alphen has explored the phenomena of the indexical portrait in relation to Christian Boltanski’s work.49 Boltanski’s Monuments (1986) consists of an altar-like arrangement of photographs of the artist and seventeen classmates, linked with a tangle of trailing wires and lit with naked bulbs, the overall effect being that of a memorial or shrine. The photographs do not perform the usual function of a portrait, that is, the making present of the subject, but can only evoke the absence of its referents; consequently, van Alphen reads these images as memorials to ‘a dead pictorial genre’.50 With mimesis declared obsolete as a representational mode, van Alphen proposed contiguity as a new method of portraiture, citing as evidence Boltanski’s Inventory of Objects That Belonged to a Woman of New York (part of the Inventories series made between 1973 and 1974), an assemblage of furniture belonging to a woman who had just died, thus representing its subject not by similarity or likeness but by physical proximity. While this indexical work does not claim to make the woman present, showing her belongings rather than the person herself, it nonetheless conjures its subject more effectively that a mimetic image. For Beneš, the scrap of cotton saturated with the fluid traces of his lover’s body and preserved in his Reliquarium evokes his partner more successfully than any pictorial work. It lays claim to a powerful sense of presence (in Beneš’s account ‘becoming’ Howard) and acts as a direct substitute for the person that it represents (a function shared with selected pictorial portraits). At the same time, the use of the indexical trace as portrait powerfully underscores the loss of its sitter. Simultaneously evoking both presence and absence, the work makes explicit the dialectic that structures all portraiture, yet  also refuses the restorative (if illusory) expression of wholeness that typically accompanies a pictorial portrait. As Cynthia Hahn notes, relics are in themselves frequently inconsequential, unappealing and unwanted items, given meaning and value through mediating practices.51 Through the act of selection, display and contextualization (the use



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of labels in particular recalls the custom of tagging a relic with an ‘authentic’ or piece of parchment affirming the relic’s provenance), Beneš transforms detritus into an affectively loaded artwork. Without context, Beneš’s fluid-soaked fragment of fabric is an insignificant, unpleasant, even abject object; framed with a personal narrative, mounted, labelled and placed in a suitable receptacle it becomes the magical embodiment of his dead partner. Writing in the 1990s about contemporary art’s compulsive preoccupation with ‘the real’, Hal Foster notes that abject, diseased or damaged bodies often form ‘the evidentiary basis of important witnessings to truth’.52 Soaked with the effluence of the dying body, Beneš’s wad of cotton can be read in these terms; like Brenda, its emphatically indexical nature allows it to function as a memorial to the life and death of an individual, while also providing empirical evidence of the medical, social and political crisis constituted by AIDS.

Relics: Robert Blanchon’s untitled [gum stain 1, 2, 3 and 4] The notion of the collective aniconic portrait is exploited to similar affect in Robert Blanchon’s untitled [gum stain 1, 2, 3 and 4]. This work consists of four photographs, each depicting a mottled grey background stained with spots and smears. On closer inspection – and after consulting the exhibition literature – these turn out to be images of a sidewalk marked with the traces of chewed gum. An alternative set of titles suggest a more focussed reading of this piece. 7985 Santa Monica Blvd, 7566 Melrose Avenue, 8722 Santa Monica Blvd and 9000 Sunset Blvd are, according to the contextual literature, all West Hollywood addresses of cruising places for gay men. Each mark acts as a ‘trace’ of an actual or potential sexual encounter, and indeed, the gum stains have been likened to wads of semen.53 These bodily deposits are clearly intended to represent the unseen men who constitute the true subjects of this conceptual group portrait, an interpretation supported by the text produced by the gallery to accompany the installation: Continuing a project begun on New York City subway platforms, documenting the chronological life-span of spat out gum, the color photographs in [gum, waste, indentations, stains + envelopes] represent isolated segments of West Hollywood sidewalks (a community known for its healthy and assimilated gay men). Depicted in various stages of decay these metaphorical images refer to the discarded, nameless victims of a number of social and medical ills.54

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There is an unmistakeable pathos in these little marks: the lack of human presence raises the spectral possibility that each stain indexes an AIDS-related death. Preserving and elevating the traces of a physical presence imprinted on the ground, Blanchon’s untitled [gum stain] pictures suggest a secular appropriation of the category of the footprint relic. As Hahn notes, such relics have a strong corroborative function, thought to be able to ‘testify to past presence through the evidence of impression’.55 The negative space of the footprint relic is perhaps more powerfully suggestive of absence than any other kind of relic. Footprint relics also make particularly explicit the relic’s associations with base matter, namely the dust or dirt that is trodden underfoot. The reliquary is used to frame material that is typically base or ‘other’, thus transforming it into the powerful and valuable relic. Blanchon knowingly plays with the idea of reframing the base and unwanted matter of chewed gum, in order to generate a critique of the popular media representation of the gay men to whom his marks allude. As monuments to loss, Blanchon’s images are constructed on a diminutive scale that bears witness to the perceived expendability of the unknown men whose traces they document. Simon Watney has observed how, in the context of the AIDS epidemic, the gay male subject has been visually and rhetorically constructed as sordid and worthless. After death, Watney claims, the ‘homosexual body’ signifies as the exact opposite of a memorial, as a marker of ‘a life that must at all costs be seen to have been devoid of value, unregretted, unlamented, and – final indignity – effaced into a mere anonymous statistic. The “homosexual body” is “disposed of ” like so much rubbish, like the trash that it was in life.’56 The lack of direct bodily representation in Blanchon’s [gum stain] pictures suggests both the anonymity and expendability of homosexual AIDS casualties. For Watney, the ‘homosexual body’ is not a tangible entity but a fantastical space where the punishment for resistance to heteronormative social practices is enacted and displayed. Historically, the rhetorical construction of the homosexual male body as an object of knowledge  – for example, through nineteenthcentury physiognomic photography – has provided scientific ‘evidence’ of the homosexual’s supposed deviance. Watney suggests that AIDS merely provides the most recent opportunity for the confirmation of what is ‘already known’ about the homosexual body: that its blemished outward appearance mirrors its moral corruption.57 Watney proposes that this imaginary body finds its ultimate expression in the over-determined image of the AIDS victim, a cadaverous bed-bound male whose physical condition announces his sexual guilt. Rather than engage with such clichéd visual iconographies, Blanchon’s AIDS ‘portrait’



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instead addresses the dominant negative fantasy of the homosexual body. The stains ironically reconceive the imaginary gay male body as a blemish on the city, untouchable, revolting and excluded from the proper social order. At the same time, by co-opting the reliquary strategy of selecting, framing and raising the stains up onto the gallery wall, Blanchon metaphorically restores to his absent portrait subjects the dignity that was denied to them in life.

Other Objects: Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled” [Portrait of Ross in L.A.] Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled” [Portrait of Ross in L.A.] (1991) was prompted by a similar motivation to Beneš’s Reliquarium; the need to memorialize a loved one, in this instance the artist’s recently deceased partner, Ross Laycock. Typically installed in the corner of the gallery, it consists of a large pile of multi-coloured cellophane-wrapped sweets with a starting mass of one-hundred and seventyfive pounds, corresponding to the ‘ideal’ weight of Laycock before his illness. Like many relics, the work is designed to be physically experienced rather than viewed in a purely optical sense; people engaging with the portrait are invited to take a sweet from the stack, which they may consume or keep as they wish; the gradual reduction of the pile echoes the wasting of its subject’s body and his eventual death. The erotic charge of the piece has been noted by a number of commentators, as has the way in which it seduces the viewer into a direct physical encounter with the stigmatized body of the person with AIDS.58 The sweets may be replenished at any time, thus giving rise to fantasies of renewal and eternal life, as well as a means of ‘remembering, repeating and working through’ the trauma of bereavement.59 In common with the other portraits explored in this chapter, “Untitled” [Portrait of Ross in L.A.] rejects an emphasis on closely observed facial likeness, instead choosing to highlight the materiality of the subject’s body, hence curator Nancy Spector’s description of Gonzalez-Torres’s sweet-based installations as ‘pushing the limits of the portrait genre’ by using ‘ “portraiture” to reference the body as a physical entity’.60 Significantly, although the diminishing body is accentuated, “Untitled” [Portrait of Ross in L.A.] rejects the over-determined image of the debilitated AIDS ‘victim’. Gonzalez-Torres claimed such depictions were inadequate for understanding AIDS: ‘I don’t need to see an image of someone dying in a hospital bed to understand AIDS. No one needs to see that: we’ve seen it before, and we’ll see more.’61 Refusing pictorial cliché, “Untitled” [Portrait of

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Ross in L.A.] knowingly offers a subtle and nuanced response to the stereotypes of early AIDS portraiture.62 Unlike the other works explored in this chapter, it does not seek to mobilize the affective or evidentiary charge of the indexical trace but instead represents the deceased portrait subject through the use of metaphor. In his chapter in this volume, Michael Newman suggests that “Untitled” [Portrait of Ross in L.A.] shares an ontological structure with ‘pre-portraits’ such as religious icons and relics. Unlike the secular modern portrait, the icon and the relic operate in a field of participation: a worshipper might kiss or touch such an object or prostrate himself on the ground before it, hoping that its spiritual power might be communicated to him. The work’s claim to constitute portraiture lies partly in the title given to it by the artist; partly in the autobiographical narrative that gives it its emotional pull; and partly in the willingness of the viewer to accept it as such – like Beneš’s Reliquarium (which is emotionally affecting only insofar as one places one’s faith in Beneš’s contextualizing story about the role played by the cotton tissue in Howard’s final moments), Gonzalez-Torres’s installation requires a degree of faith on the part of the viewer. The interaction between viewer and artwork is as significant as that between artist and sitter; one might argue that it is more so, as it is this relationship that activates the portrait and creates meaning. This necessary faith is strikingly alluded to in the way in which the work repurposes the sacrament of the Eucharist – that is, the miracle through which the bread and wine are literally transformed for the faithful into the body and blood of Christ. By taking a sweet  – the ‘body’ of the portrait subject  – and eating it, the engaged viewer is participating in a secular reinterpretation of this holy sacrament, effectively ‘performing’ their own belief in the work.

Closing remarks In the context of the AIDS crisis, the use of relic-based portraiture offered an effective solution to a number of challenges created by the epidemic and its social, cultural and political reception. As argued in the first part of this chapter, the use of non-pictorial portraiture allowed artists to avoid the exhausted stereotype of the AIDS victim and, in the context of the culture wars, to circumvent the threat of potential censorship. The aniconic nature of the portraits discussed in this chapter proved particularly effective at representing a community that had been rendered invisible elsewhere, from the female HIV-positive drug user



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remembered in Beneš’s Brenda to the cohort of un-named gay men memorialized in Blanchon’s [gum stain] series. Aniconic representation reveals itself to be especially well-suited to memorial portraiture, intensifying the impression of loss or absence that is fleetingly alluded to, then simultaneously disavowed, by the conventional pictorial portrait. The use of relic-like objects intensifies this effect, allowing the artist to situate the portrait in relation to a discourse of dirt or abjection that not only suggests the social marginalization of the portrait subject but also facilitates their honorific commemoration. The indexical power of the relic is harnessed as a means of both conjuring the physical presence of the subject and as a form of material evidence or testimony that allows the portrait to function as a critique of the social and political circumstances that transformed AIDS from a medical crisis into a cultural one. Finally, the relic-based portrait is significant in that its emotional power is dependent on the viewer’s willingness to place their faith in its worth and value, despite its deceptively humble appearance.

Notes 1 On likeness, interiority and identity in portraiture see Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (London: Reaktion Books, 1991); Shearer West, Portraiture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 21–41; and Joanna Woodall, ‘Introduction: Facing the Subject’, in Portraiture: Facing the Subject, ed. Joanna Woodall (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 1–25. 2 For the associations of portraiture with ‘bourgeois individuality’ see Woodall, ‘Introduction’, p. 15; Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘Residual Resemblance: Three Notes on the Ends of Portraiture’, in Face-Off: The Portrait in Recent Art, ed. Melissa E. Feldman (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1994), pp. 53–69. 3 Brilliant, Portraiture, p. 8. 4 Cynthia Hahn, The Reliquary Effect: Enshrining the Sacred Object (London:  Reaktion Books, 2017), p. 232. 5 Hahn, The Reliquary Effect, p. 7. 6 Cynthia Hahn, ‘Objects of Devotion and Desire: Relics, Reliquaries, Relation, and Response’, in Objects of Devotion and Desire: Medieval Relics to Contemporary Art (New York: The Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery, Hunter College, 2011), pp. 8–19 (19); Hahn takes her definition of ‘relational’ art from Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods (Dijon: Presses du reel, 2002).

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7 Hahn, The Reliquary Effect, pp. 233–4. 8 Hahn describes relics as ‘incomplete objects’; Hahn, The Reliquary Effect, p. 8. 9 Hahn, The Reliquary Effect, p. 6. 10 W. T. J. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 111; for an early example of a text that treats relics as ‘objects with agency’ see Patrick Geary, ‘Sacred Commodities: The Circulation of Medieval Relics’, in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 169–94. 11 Woodall, ‘Introduction’, p. 3. 12 Herve Guibert, ‘The Cancerous Image’, in Ghost Image (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1996), pp. 154–8. 13 For example, see Robert Storr, ‘When This You See Remember Me’, in Felix Gonzalez-Torres, ed. Julie Ault (New York: Steidl, 2006), pp. 5–37 (8); see also Nancy Spector, Felix Gonzalez-Torres (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1995), p. 147. 14 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 2000), p. 80. 15 For an authoritative analysis of AIDS as a social and cultural, as well as medical, phenomena, see Douglas Crimp, ‘AIDS: Cultural Analysis / Cultural Activism’, October, 43, Winter (1987), 3–16. 16 Douglas Crimp, ‘Portraits of People with AIDS’, in Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 83–107; Jan Zita Grover, ‘Visible Lesions: Images of the PWA’, in Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian and Queer Essays on Popular Culture, ed. Corey K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 354–81. 17 For a critique of the figure of the AIDS hero see Gregg Bordowitz, The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous and Other Writings, 1986–2003, ed. James Meyer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). 18 Douglas Crimp, ‘Portraits of People with AIDS’, in Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 83–107. 19 This passage is quoted by Crimp, ‘Portraits of People with AIDS’, p. 98; see also Allan Sekula, ‘Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation)’, The Massachusetts Review, 19.4 (1978), 859–83. 20 Allan Sekula, ‘The Body and the Archive’, October, 39 (1986), 3–64. Crimp does not refer directly to this text, but as editor of October he would surely have been familiar with it. 21 Sekula, ‘The Body and the Archive’, p. 10. 22 For a concise account of the culture wars in relation to the visual arts see Carol S. Vance, ‘The Pleasures of Looking: The Attorney General’s Commission on



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Pornography versus Visual Images’, in The Critical Image: Essays on Contemporary Photography, ed. Carol Squiers (Seattle: Bay Press, 1990), pp. 38–58. 23 Jonathan Katz, ‘How AIDS Changed American Art’, in Art AIDS America (Tacoma, Seattle and London: Tacoma Art Museum in association with University of Washington Press, 2015), pp. 24–45 (24–5). 24 Significant texts include Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), pp. 142–8; Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’, in The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 1991), pp. 101–20. 25 Anne Collins Goodyear, ‘On the Birth of the Subject and the Defacement of Portraiture’, in This Is a Portrait If I Say so: Identity in American Art 1912 to Today (New Haven and London: Bowdoin College Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2016), pp. 91–120 (93). 26 Robert Clark, ‘Cut to Ribbons’, The Guardian, 15 March 1996. 27 Deborah Robin, Brenda and Other Stories: Art + HIV + You (Walsall: Walsall Art Gallery, 1996). 28 David Kirby, ‘Artist’s Exhibit On Pain of AIDS Is Not Sacred’, New York Times, 17 August 1997. 29 Royce W. Smith, ‘Local Responses, Global Pandemic: Rethinking Representations of HIV/AIDS’, in Global and Local Art Histories, ed. Celia Jeffery and Gregory Minissale (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007), pp. 1–26 (22); Smith is drawing on his own interviews with the artist. 30 Brilliant, Portraiture, p. 7; Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Plato as Portraitist’, in The Gadamer Reader: A Bouquet of the Later Writings, ed. Richard E. Palmer (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), pp. 293–321. 31 Brilliant, Portraiture, p. 8. 32 Brilliant, Portraiture, p. 15. 33 Woodall, ‘Introduction’, p. 8. 34 David Groff, ‘The Passion of Barton Beneš’, POZ, August 1999, 51–4 (54). 35 Barton Lidice Beneš, ‘Cremation Sensation’, POZ, December 1996, 84–6; see D. Prendergast, Jenny Hockey and L. Kellaher, ‘Blowing in the Wind? Identity, Materiality, and the Destination of Human Ashes’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 12 (2006), 881–98 (88). The erotic relation implied by the mixing of ashes is confirmed by Beneš’s mother’s response when he told her that he wanted their ashes to be combined and stored together: ‘Isn’t that incest?’ Groff, ‘The Passion of Barton Beneš’, p. 54. 36 Robert Hertz, Death and the Right Hand, trans. R Needham and C Needham (Aberdeen: Cohen & West, 1960); quoted in Prendergast, Hockey and Kellaher, ‘Blowing in the Wind?, pp. 883–4. 37 Prendergast, Hockey and Kellaher, ‘Blowing in the Wind?, p. 885.

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38 Melissa E. Feldman, ‘The Portrait: From Somebody to Nobody’, in Face-Off: The Portrait in Recent Art, ed. Melissa E. Feldman (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1994), pp. 9–10 (10). 39 Sarah E. H. Moore, Ribbon Culture: Charity, Compassion, and Public Awareness (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 60. 40 Barton Lidice Beneš quoted in Degen Pener, ‘EGOS & IDS: Red Ribbons Are Turning Black and Blue’, New York Times, 23 May 1993. 41 ACT UP ‘ashes action’ flyer, quoted in Deborah Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 230. 42 Cindy Patton, Last Served? Gendering the AIDS Pandemic (London: Taylor and Francis, 1994); see also Monika Gagnon and James Miller, ‘A Convergence of Stakes: Photography, Feminism, and AIDS’, in Fluid Exchanges: Artists and Critics in the AIDS Crisis, ed. James Miller (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), pp. 53–64; for an account of how women lost their presence of the AIDS research agenda see Paula Treichler, How to Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of AIDS (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 42–59. 43 Barton Lidice Beneš, Curiosa: Celebrity Relics, Historical Fossils, & Other Metamorphic Rubbish (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002), pp. 5–6. 44 Beneš, Curiosa: Celebrity Relics, Historical Fossils, & Other Metamorphic Rubbish, p. 6. 45 Peter S. Hawkins, ‘Naming Names: The Art of Memory and the NAMES Projects AIDS Quilt’, Critical Enquiry, 19.4 (1993), 752–79 (764). 46 Erika Doss, Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), p. 113. 47 For an account of St Veronica’s cloth, see Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); see also Hahn, The Reliquary Effect, pp. 118–22. 48 Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘The Index of the Absent Wound (Monograph on a Stain)’, trans. Thomas Repensek, October, 29 (1984), 63–81 (68). 49 Ernst van Alphen, ‘The Portrait’s Dispersal: Concepts of Representation and Subjectivity in Contemporary Portraiture’, in Portraiture: Facing the Subject, ed. Joanna Woodall (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 239–56. 50 van Alphen, ‘The Portrait’s Dispersal’, p. 248. 51 Hahn, The Reliquary Effect, pp. 19–20. 52 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), p. 166. 53 Fred Camper, ‘Writing on the Wall / Robert Blanchon: Gum, Waste, Indentations, Stains, and Envelopes’, Chicago Reader, 2 February 1996.



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54 Robert Blanchon, ‘[Gum, Waste, Indentations, Stains + Envelopes]’ (Fales Library, 1996), The Robert Blanchon Archive, box 5, folder 9. 55 Hahn, The Reliquary Effect, p. 25. 56 Simon Watney, ‘The Spectacle of AIDS’, October, 43 (1987), 71–86 (80). 57 Watney, ‘The Spectacle of AIDS’, p. 73. 58 Robert Storr notes that ‘mouthing the candy’ is essential to experiencing the work; Storr, p. 8; Spector sees ‘pliant savoury bodies waiting to be plucked and consumed’; Spector, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, p. 147. 59 Gonzalez-Torres was familiar with Freud’s writing on loss and repetition; see Tim Rollins, ‘Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Interview’, in Felix Gonzalez-Torres, ed. William S. Bartman (New York: ART Press, 1993), pp. 5–31 (13). 60 Spector, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, p. 146. 61 Spector, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, p. 166. 62 It also cleverly deflects the threat of censorship; see Katz, ‘How AIDS Changed American Art’, pp. 24–41.

216

Index absence absence and loss 34–5, 177–84, 189–90, 203–7 Howard Hodgkin, Absent Friends 2–3 interplay of presence and absence (see presence) see also disappearance abstraction abstract expressionism 110–13 diagrams and data 54 action painting 110–12 AIDS 39–40, 195–215, 205 Memorial Quilt as portrait 205 analogy (as a mode of portraiture) 26, 38–41, 59–60 anti-portrait definitions 1–2, 59–61, 108–9, 118 histories 8–13 Swanson, Laura, Anti-Self-Portraits 153–7, 159, 163–9 Arbus, Diane 159–62 archive 51, 56–7, 125, 183 artistic labour 109–10, 113–20 art market 117–20 authenticity artist as a source of ‘authentic’ meaning 115, 117–18 of the index 206 of representation 84–5 of the self 53 Barthes, Roland ‘Archimboldo, or Magician and Rhétoriqueur’ 59 Camera Lucida 123, 128, 132, 197 ‘The Death of the Author’ 199 Beneš, Barton Lidicé 200–7 bio bio-art 145 bio-data 53–4 bio-portrait 4–5, 47–8 Dewey-Hagborg, Heather 48

Quinn, Marc 4–5, 48 bio-power 49–50 biological model of identity see identity Blanchon, Robert 207–9 capitalism 9, 15, 45, 53 Cézanne, Paul 28, 42, 75–8, 82–4, 91–2, 98 collective portraits 203, 2–5, 207–9 composite portraits 41, 48, 52, 92 Cornell, Joseph 38–9, 205 corporeality 107, 112–13, 119, 146 cubism 8, 11, 12, 69, 73–7, 82–4 data data portraits 3–6, 50, 47–59 Susan Morris, 53–9 data power 14–15, 49–50 data profiling and data mining 14, 25, 50–1 death death of the portrait 8, 9, 11, 69 portraiture’s relation to death 27–8, 34, 47–9, 57, 127–8, 178, 186, 201–9 depersonalization 123–41 diaries 55–8 disability disability aesthetics 155–6 disability portraiture 156, 158 disappearance of the sitter from the canvas 8–9 disappeared persons 175–90 Duchamp, Marcel 29, 34, 39, 43, 60, 116 O’Doherty, Brian, Portrait of Marcel Duchamp 30, 48, 58 evidence evidentiary effect of the portrait 10, 18, 48, 189, 202–3, 207, 211 face centrality of face to portraiture 3–4, 11

218 effacement, refusal or negation of the face 16–17, 59–61 as ethical relation, Lévinas, Emmanuel 60 ‘faceless man of the masses’ 96 facelessness (in post-Holocaust art) 180–4 as signifying system, Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix 13 see also likeness, physiognomic family family album 51, 125–7, 166–7 family portraits Janin, Zuzanna 47 Quieto, Lucila, and Germano, Gustavo 182–3 Ruff, Thomas 10, 48 Struth, Thomas 45–7 figuration break with 1–2, 10 film portraits 132–4 Foucault, Michel 9, 13, 59, 199 Freud, Sigmund Mourning and Melancholia 58–9 Penguin Freud Library 55–6 gaze in disability studies 153–7, 162–9 white, male, colonial 42–6 see also staring Gonzalez-Torres, Felix 39–41, 209–10 icon religious icon 26, 38, 210 shift from the icon to the index or symbol 11, 14, 29, 51, 58, 196–7, 205–7 see also index, symbol identity biological model of identity 4–5, 47–8, 53–4 collective identity 195 (see also collective portraits) erasure of identity 175–82 identity cards 50, 179–80 non-identity thinking, Adorno, Theodor 129 social identity 3 illness

Index AIDS-related illness 39–40, 198–200 mental illness 144–5 index data as index 51, 53–9 as evidence 201–3, 206 indexical portraits 29–30, 48, 105–22, 157–8, 195–8, 200–9 Boltanski, Christian 11, 206 indexical registration of the body 50, 110 blood 42 bodily fluids 107, 203–7 foot and handprints 105–6, 112–13 relics 196–8 Peirce, Charles Sanders 105, 206 intentionality (Gadamer, Hans Georg) 3, 201 interiority 26–30, 43, 51, 107–8 language gestural language 4 language portraits (see word portraits) and perceptual experience 79–80 likeness and difference 41, 59 emotional or psychological 2, 11 (see also essence and interiority) rejection of likeness as basis for portraiture 175–6, 181–4, 195–8, 201 physiognomic 1–8, 19 n.1, 91–2, 156, 176 as similarity 46–77 as synonym for portrait 3, 31 see also resemblance masks Anomalisa (film) 60–1 Arbus, Diane 162 cubism 8 Swanson, Laura 162–3, 165–7 Wearing, Gillian and Cahun, Claude 10 material portraits 175–6, 184–90 medical images Aldworth, Susan 143–51 HIV/AIDS 198–9 medical photography and variant bodies 158–9 Tuymans, Luc 136–8

Index memory 139 and construction of self 139 cultural memory 124–7, 130, 132, 135–9 memorial portraits 197, 200–11 memory sites 178–83 Sala de Memoria 184–9 portraiture as reconstruction from memory 77, 91, 97 mimesis mimetic function of art and literature 70, 81, 85 mimetic portraiture challenges to 8, 11, 15, 19, 44, 45–8, 50–1, 69 non-mimetic portraits 17–18, 105–22, 143–51, 184–90, 195–215 see also naturalistic portraiture mirrors use of in portraiture 26, 38, 39, 42, 49, 166 modernism 15–16, 71–4, 69–89 Morris, Robert 16, 51, 105–22 Hand and Toe Hold 112–13 I-Box 35, 114–17 Passageway 118–20 Portrait 107–8 Scale with Hand 105–6 Self-Portrait (EEG) 29–30, 48 Morris, Susan 5–6, 15, 53–9 mourning 58–9, 130, 175–6, 180–9, 197–8 perception 75–82, 92–4 performative portraits 9–10, 34, 60 statements 12, 31 photography 9, 55–7, 182–3, 197–9 About Face: Photography and the Death of the Portrait (exhibition) 11 as ‘beheading’ 27–8 and the index 55–6, 197–9 as social identification 47, 50 vernacular photography and found images 123–41 Dean, Tacita 130–4 Richter, Gerhard 124–30 Tuymans, Luc 135–9 Pliny the origins of portraiture 34

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presence 92–3, 196–7, 201, 208, 211 corporeal presence 105–9, 113 interplay between presence and absence 39, 108, 126, 131, 182–3, 196–6, 206 Rauschenberg, Robert 9, 12, 31 relics 195–8, 200–11 Renaissance portraiture 19 n.1, 26 resemblance 2–4, 35, 45–9, 92, 97 see also likeness Ruskin, John 75–6, 80–1, 83, 84 Sartre, Jean Paul 92–5 selfie 48–9, 166 self-tracking 54–5 shadow 34–8, 52, 55–9 shifter 35–7, 58 silhouette 95, 176, 182–3 sitter 1–4, 8–9, 126, 196–8 sovereignty 25–8 spectator see viewer staring 153, 156–7, 169–71 Stein, Gertrude ‘Picasso’ 83–4 ‘Pictures’ 81–2 as sitter 8, 69 Tender Buttons 70–4 subjectivity artist’s subjectivity 114–18 bourgeois subjectivity 8–9 emptying of subjectivity 11 and interiority/exteriority 28–9, 43, 57 operations of subjectivity 1 and temporality 5–6 surrealism 10, 25, 69, 131, 144 Swanson, Laura 153–74 symbolic, 14, 16, 29, 58–9 see also index and icon This is a Portrait if I Say So (exhibition), 12–13 viewer role of the viewer 7–8, 26, 78, 92, 209–10 voyeurism 6, 113–16, 162, 167 word-portraits 29–34

220 Bochner, Mel, Portrait of Eva Hesse 31–2 Rauschenberg, Robert, Portrait of Iris Clert 30–1

Index Sasaguchi, Kazz, Constellation 32–3 Wallinger, Mark, Self (Times New Roman) 35–8