Portraiture as Impossibility
He walks down the street, a strong sense of self, determination . A long beige gabardine, fast walk. Veins sculpting his hands, strong jaw, and intelligent glasses .Mid thirties. He stops and looks into the sky.
I feel intrigue, curious, anxious. I can feel my perspiration. I want to know him, the man in the long gabardine. An urge to feel him, to touch the undressed skin.
It is a dark room, we walk in. I turn on the light and then I turn it off again.
I remove his clothes, slowly. As each fraction of his body gets exposed, a deeper thirst for more invades the room. I bite his nipples with a mixture of angst and delicacy. I look into his eyes and they scape mine. I see nothing. My hands move faster, more assertively. I squeeze his balls, I bite his nipples, harder this time.
With my belt and an extension cord that it was lying on the ground , I tie him down. He breathes faster, deeper. I can feel the air coming out from his lungs. Warm and dense, intoxicated with tabacco. I look back into his eyes. He stays quiet at my stare. I can see my reflection on his charcoalgrey pupils.
His whole body lies totally exposed, his legs spread apart, just slightly. His arsehole dark and hairy. I slide my fist inside of him, pushing further in until I feel the his annus pulsating close to my elboy. Warm, deeper, feeling his guts , his organs. Blood starts flowing . I go deeper. – you are mine-
I start hitting him. Pain in piercing noises .Broken nose and torn lips. Skin boiling red.
His eyes wide open and fading into white. Hands around his neck . Pressing harder.
He stops breathing. I press even harder in silence. I feel the blood slowly stop flowing. Hands still around his neck. I close my eyes and enjoy the moment.
With a kitchen knife I start stabbing him. Eyes pulled out of their sockets and lying on the ground, stomach partially open, intestines spreading on the floor, a smell of shit and blood fills the space. The knife moves more fiercely. Only the noise of the blade cutting through the flesh and bone seems to exist. I put down the knife, step on one of the eye balls, by accident, and walk out the room.
I sit down in the living room, turn on the tv and stay silence just watching at the moving images. No sound.
The movement of the gabardine and that strong smell come back to my mind.
It is back to the commercial break.
I try to remember if I ever asked for his name.
In the Buddhist tradition, nothing exists for any length of time. There is no substance or duration to things. Each moment is an entirely new existence, which is succeeded by an entirely new existence. The only connection between one thing and the next is that one leads to the next. Nothing has an essence, nature, or character in and of itself. Things in isolation are shûnya, “empty.” The nature of things only exist in relation to everything else that exists. Existence, as defined by Buddhism, is thus completely relative and conditioned by everything else.
By contrast, Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote that it is the essence that lies beyond an object’s visual presence. For instance, beyond what we see as an apple, is an understanding of its essential status as an apple—its apple-ness. Ortega, unlike the Buddhist then, believes that there is, somewhere beneath the surface of what we see, an alternate reality.
This paper is concerned with this opposition—that of emptiness and that of essential (hidden) reality– and how this contradiction affects also the definition of ‘self’. Moreover it will analyze two approaches of capturing the self, through examples of different approaches that artists have taken to portraiture.
After eighteen years living between Sydney, Barcelona and Glasgow, life feels as if I have been jumping for one world to the other. Different friends, time zones, seasons, ways of thinking and interacting with people. In each city I come across a different feeling of “self’. The Dani in Barcelona is quite different to the one in Glasgow or Sydney. While in I am in a particular city, it feels as if I have never left the place, and when I look back to friends and the life in Sydney, the whole picture becomes out of focus,. It’s almost impossible to picture faces belonging to the other cities left behind. Their features are disjointed, blurred, as if they stoped existing for me. The whole experience makes you feel quiet disconnected, as if both ,location and people, are just an illusion. It feels like everything, straight after the moment of the experience, falls into a void, as if the ‘real’ falls straight after into a mist., as if there is not much to hold onto. There is a sense of different realities running parallel at the same time. The dream world is not that far away of what we normally conceive as reality.
The conception of “self” has changed and gets questioned with time. What defines us as individuals?
Traditionally the self was defined by a role in a meaningful, hierarchical cosmic order; there was a clear distinction between the mere living in earth and a higher kind of life. Then in modernity, the self was understood as a self contained individual, with out defining relationships with the outside world, a concept that was to be questioned in post-modernity by describing the self as a decentered, fragmented, with a loss of agency and moral vacuum .
The self is socially constructed, it may appear centered, unified and singular, but this symbolic structures are as multidimensional and diverse as the social relationships that surround it. We encounter more a ‘dialogical self’, with a dynamic multiplicity of ‘I’ positions in the landscape of the mind. The self is socially constructed, as a such in continuous fluctuation. We are constantly thinking of ourselves, telling stories of who we are. In a sense we come to be through those stories.
In late modern identity, there is a sense of a more managed self , more fluid. We are constantly fitting one selves into a community of ‘strangers’. The inner criteria of personal unity is replace by more transactional criteria of flexibility and expressiveness. To what degree there is a ‘core-self’ or, on the other hand, it is all about performance?. We are constantly in the process of ‘producing’ our selves for others.
As Vitor Burguin points out, our self image, and the images we have of others, are always to some degree fictional. The word’fiction’ here may bring with it such notions as’ narrative’ and staging’. We are constantly playing a role in society. There is the ongoing question if we are born into the world with an individual core , that keeps evolving and changing as we progress through life, through our interactions and encounters; o on the other hand, there is not such thing a ‘initial self’ as we are just consequence of our encounters and the different roles that we are ‘made’ to play during the life time.
‘No firm identity, shifting and multiple identities. This is how subjectivity functions today’. (Slavoj Zizek)
Portraiture as a Way to Capture an Alternate ‘Self’
Historically, portrait artists have tried to discover some central core of personhood as the proper object of their representation. Since early days , artists realised that in order to portrait someone, there was more involved than just capturing some physical recognition of the subject, as physical appearance keeps on changing. They aimed towards capturing, the special quality or qualities that they thought defined their subjects. They used symbology to express a conceptual content attached to the subject that went beyond the physical appearance. The invisible core of the self has always been hard to grasp and even harder to portray.
I am particularly interested to look into the use of abstraction, as substitute of early symbology, used in order to get closer to that conceptual reality of the person portrayed.
A portrait can be freed from all forms of descriptive reference to physical appearance without losing its categorical status as an intentionally exclusive sign of a particular individual. How a given person looks at any time would then be irrelevant for the purposes of portraiture and unnecessary as a reference for a portrait image, if it is wholly the artist’s vision that ultimately forms that image.
Some artist consciously distort representation of the self as a conscious at distortion of the physiological representation of the sitter. Francis Bacon’s portraits of popes, friends and even himself, all seem to look alike, as if he were seeking to express himself through their contorted images. Bacon stated his intention and his need to distort in order to represent the ‘real’ appearance of somebody can be understood as a fight against stereotypical representations of the subject. Bacon depicts in his work the fight between subject and representations. He imposes his alien self as a subject upon his portrait subjects. He talks about his portrayals as ‘conflicts between the artificiality of representation and the resistance of the model to that artificiality‘. He emphasises on the need to distortion in order to represent the ‘real’ appearance of somebody can be understood as a fight against stereotypical representation of the subject.
Francis Picabia, made a number of non – objective portraits of a number of friends, from 1915 to 1920 , without attempting to convey any hint of mimetic resemblance, as if he had rejected such representation of the simulacra of these persons as fundamentally untrue. The subjects were as they appeared in his mind and nowhere else. Machinery components, screws and wheels configured his portraits.’ Similar we can say about Picasso’s portraits during his cubist period. They look like they are constituted of components, ‘units’. The same components are used to portrait different sitters. All the sitters ‘dissolve’ the cubist primas/edge. At the time, Picasso’s cubist portraits not only explored a new way to represent his subjects, but at the same time articulated a new conception of subjectivity. His representational mode is no longer mimetic. The signs that Picasso uses in these portraits are ‘virtual’. His aim is to construct an illusion of subjectivity with forms that are totally arbitrary and exchangeable . To differentiate one subject to the other becomes an impossibility. The only way we can recognised the sitter is by the title given to the work.
Portraiture as Mediated Self . Paul Klee explored the challenge to personal identity. He used the mask to investigate its potential for concealment and revelation, and that’s the nature of the mask. The masks in his work express his uncertainty as to whether visible faces have any continuous and true connection to their bearers and whether there is any core of self to which specific. Masks are not about recognition or appearance; they are about desire of what lies underneath and what do they represent. The mask can be a tool to transcend the body as limit.
The portrait is less about recognition than about desire ( Water Benjamin)
A good friend of mine, of very gentle nature, works as an IT consultant. Very conservative life, quiet and quite immerse in a routine. He dresses up in rubber every now and then, and wears a mask designed to constrict this air intake. It is only when his covers himself in a rubber suit and behind the mask that he can access to a part of his ‘self’ , a deeper one, that only is accessible thorough whole ritual.
We don’t know how we look like, we know how we feel inside, or at least most times. When we look ourselves into the mirror, we tend to ‘arrange’ our faces to fit how we feel inside, many times we feel alien to our own refection.
Reality Motivated by Absence . In the work of Christian Boltanski, he is very outspoken in his desire to ‘capture reality’. The portraits don’t signify ‘presence’ but exactly the opposite: absence. Similar motivations can be found in Marlene Dumas, Dutch artist of South African origin, the faces in her work evoke emptiness and death, subjectivity is not present, but rather absent. The faces of the subjects she paints are blurred, out of focus, they feel as if they stop been there Warhol in his portraits presents his sitters deprived of their interiority, they are exhibited as public substitutes for subjectivity. His painterly performance is abscent.
I am sitting now in front of the computer. I am thinking of my mother. I think of her often but, as always, I find hard to picture her face, it is almost an impossibility, and also the fact that I don’t keep pictures of her in the house, does not help. I know how the thought of her makes me feel,. If I were asked to make a portrait of my mother, or to choose a photograph that “depicts” her, I would find it a difficult task . There are so many partial images of her in my memory, but none of them is complete. The 60’s big breasts ( thereafter she had them reduced) , the 70’s mad hair do’s, the 80’s constant inflations and deflations of her figure ( in search of the greatest diet) , the 90’s , … I lost track there, as I first move to Australia …and in the last few years, the plastic surgery…She is changing constantly, as we all do, I suppose. Even her personality, her maners , and the way we interact. She lives in me as a thought, as a vibration. I don’t have much of a sense for her as real. There is a sense of inaccessibility towards the other person. To recollect her in my mind would always feel like an uncompleted exercise.
A Reality that Exists Beyond the Self. For Herzog, German filmmaker , cinema , like poetry, is inherently able to present a number of dimensions much deeper than the level of so –called truth that we find in cinema verite and even reality itself. He is convenience that it is only through invention and fabrication that the filmmaker is able to reach a more intense level of truth that cannot otherwise be found. In his films many times he uses people he encounters, no actors, and makes them perform , under his direction, an articulated self, through Herzog’s interventions he intensifies their own experiences taking us to deeper sense of self.
Zizek states that truth can only be achieved by adopting a partial, engaged, subjective stance towards a particular event or antagonism (one whose reality is precisely “virtual”). He consistently denies any attempt and the impossibility to grasp situations objectively in their totality.
‘ the portrait returns, but with a difference, now exemplifying a critique of the bourgeois self instead of its authority, showing a loss of self instead of its consolidation; shaping the subject as simulacrum instead of as origin. The project of ‘portraying somebody in her/his individual originality or quality of essence has come to an end. But portraiture as genre has become the form of new conceptions of subjectivity and new notions of representation’
Portraiture,
There is an element of attraction that the artist experiences towards the subject that motivates him/her to capture the ‘sitter’. Attraction that The concept of attraction and capturing a subject always has a sexual component always has . I am interested in the struggle motivated, by the attraction , the urge to capture the sitter and tis is through that struggle to something get generated, something else other than the self. Is it in the process that something gets created, a painting , a film, it is an in between stages, but the artist can never fully capture. There’s is an intention and that what matters. The sitter works as a starting point to create something that did not exist before. The portrait is driven by the an act of impossibility In a sense is in between stages That attraction This motivation is a personal one focal enables this first step can from the artist towards the subject
For Hans- Georg Gadamer a portrait’s claim to significance lies in the intended reference, whether the viewer happens to be aware of it or not, therefore the viewer’s awareness of the art work as a portrait is distinctly secondary to the artist’s intention to portray someone in an art work
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist , not of the sitter. The sitter is merely an accident, the occasion.
It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas , reveals himself. ( Oscar Wilde)
Walter Benjamin once remarked that ‘the portrait becomes after a few generations no more than a testimony of the art of the person who pained it’
Cinema verite- truth of cinema; that is , it was concerned with the medium’s potential to transmit an experience of the ‘real”
Bibliography:
Victor, Burgin. The end of art theory. London. Macmillan Education Ltd, 1986
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. London.Vintage edition 1999
Herzog, Werner. Herzog on Herzog.London. Faber and Faber Limited, 2002
Woodall, Joanna. Portraiture, Facing the subject, Manchester. Manchester University Press 1997
Brillandt, Richard. Portraiture. London. Reaktion Books Limited 1991
1 The four notions of self- Internet search
2 The Absence of Presence- Victor Burgin.
3Ernst Van Alphen. The portrit’s dispersal: concepts of reresntation and subjectivity in contemporary portraiture.
4 Pointon Marcia. Kahnweiler’s Picasoo; Picasso’s Kahnweiler,
5 Ernst Van Alphen. The portrit’s dispersal: concepts of reresntation and subjectivity in contemporary portraiture.
6 Ernst Van Alphen. The portrit’s dispersal: concepts of reresntation and subjectivity in contemporary portraiture.
7 Brillant, Richard. Portraiture, pp. 7
John Calcutt, writer, teacher and the former head of Glasgow School of Art’s Master of Fine Art (MFA) programme
Glasgow 2006