In many ways possessing a portrait of someone has been considered a position of power, we are able to gaze at their image with no risk of being caught staring. By the same token we will never receive a flicker of recognition in return, nor have any possibility of contact. In fact the longer we gaze the more the image reveals itself to be just that, colour on a surface or electromagnetic discharges on a screen. Many artists have been acutely aware of this and sought to shift the register of their image from voyeurism to empathy. There are a number of ways of doing this, in the western painting tradition from Velasquez through Courbet to Freud and even Richter. The artist makes a kind of painterly equivalent of the sensation of the subject in which the medium and process by which the subject is conveyed is emphasised. In order to experience this sensation the viewer is required to reconstitute the medium as image internally. In this way a transformation of material to image occurs in the body of the viewer enhancing the emotional impact of the image. Alternatively the artist might construct the image in such a way as to make us acutely aware of our own position before the image and of the nature of our looking. Both these strategies produce a kind of interactivity which may translate into a feeling of identification with the subject. These strategies occur throughout Face to Face albeit in new technologies.
The invitation to contribute to this exhibition catalogue Face to Face came as a welcome excuse to revisit a particular interest of mine. In 2005/6 I curated an In many ways possessing a portrait of someone has been considered a position of power, we are able to gaze at their image with no risk of being caught staring. By the same token we will never receive a flicker of recognition in return, nor have any possibility of contact. In fact the longer we gaze the more the image reveals itself to be just that, colour on a surface or electromagnetic discharges on a screen. Many artists have been acutely aware of this and sought to shift the register of their image from voyeurism to empathy. There are a number of ways of doing this, in the western painting tradition from Velasquez through Courbet to Freud and even Richter. The artist makes a kind of painterly equivalent of the sensation of the subject in which the medium and process by which the subject is conveyed is emphasised. In order to experience this sensation the viewer is required to reconstitute the medium as image internally. In this way a transformation of material to image occurs in the body of the viewer enhancing the emotional impact of the image. Alternatively the artist might construct the image in such a way as to make us acutely aware of our own position before the image and of the nature of our looking. Both these strategies produce a kind of interactivity which may translate into a feeling of identification with the subject. These strategies occur throughout Face to Face albeit in new technologies. The invitation to contribute to this exhibition catalogue Face to Face came as a welcome excuse to revisit a particular interest of mine. In 2005/6 I curated an exhibition Self portraits: Renaissance to contemporary. The self portrait is a very particular kind of portrait that can reveal a lot about the fictions involved in the process of representation including the set up in the studio. I found that many of the ideas expressed in these portraits were surprisingly consistent over the 500 years covered by the exhibition. Many of them explored the complex nature of the mirror by playing tricks within the construction of the image to manipulate the position of the viewer before the canvas. As early as the 16th century the possibility of interactivity was at work in ‘portraits of the artist seen in the mirror’.1 Looking through the artists in this exhibition I can see fascinating parallels between early modern portraits and current strategies albeit in very different media. In 2005 I wrote:
“…noticing the fiction of the displacement of the mirror by the framed painting engenders self-consciousness about the identification which occurs between the viewer and the painter. By physically and visually ‘occupying the place’ of the artist, viewers can imagine themselves to exceed the boundary between self and other, between personal, interiorised, embodied experience and the knowledge of others (and ourselves) gained through our apprehension of the way they (and we) look from the outside. The eyes that ‘meet’ in the mirror/canvas seem to brush the different subjectivities of artist and spectator against one another.”2
My initial idea was simply to show the empathy engendered by some self portraits. The idea arose as a result of existential confusion between canvas and mirror while I was looking at a late Rembrandt. I found myself standing for rather longer than usual in front of Rembrandt’s mature self portrait in Kenwood House in London. I experienced an unusual degree of identification with Rembrandt’s likeness. It was very much like looking in the mirror and seeing yourself reflected except of course I look nothing like Rembrandt. It may have been that I fell for that maligned idea of the internal world that we are supposed to be able to read in the exemplary portrait.
So what was I seeing in the Rembrandt? It was not easy to withdraw from what was a very empathetic and immersive experience to try and describe what was going on objectively. I called it a mature portrait; it is in fact an image of an ageing man just as the mirror I seemed to be facing would reveal me to be. So maybe to a younger person I do look a bit like Rembrandt or at least we share some objective features such as wrinkles, slightly red eyes, double chin and so on. But none of that comes close to explaining the intensity of self recognition I was experiencing. Maybe it was the expression around the mouth and eyes that seemed so intimately to resonate with my own interior world. This was an empathy that had little to do with the externally mirrored body and everything to do with the feeling that what I was seeing was a reflection of interiority. I am perfectly prepared to concede that this could have been a personal projection or hallucination; I am just describing the surprisingly disconcerting experience as I felt it at the time.
Rembrandt was responsible for setting me up for this transference, in some way the work was a template for self reflection and not just the likeness of a stranger. The image shows a man who could be a touch immodest; he worked hard, made a lot of pretty good art and was on the whole respected when he was not in the divorce or debtors courts. We know this from history but it is also clear from the painting I was looking at which is demonstrably a master work. The artist has drawn two ellipses in the background that seem to be a demonstration of his draughtsmanship rather like the hand drawn circle Giotto is said to have sent his patron as proof of his talent. Although the surroundings are only sketched in we sense that it is a solid home and although he is dressed for the studio he none the less appears as a person of substance in his fur coat and academic styled cap. Looking into the real mirror he had set up in the studio he must have seen all this. In his life time he painted and drew a great many self portraits and tronnies (portraits using your own face to establish character for your repertoire) so he had plenty of opportunity to reflect on some of these effects.
There was something in the expression that worked against this vision of the master’s stature. While he shows no doubt about his status as an artist there is something like resignation about the mouth, a suppressed smile about the eyes, it is a thoughtful even slightly wistful face. He seemed to be thinking “how did I get into all this, what am I really doing here” it is a timeless even monumental image and yet within it there is a tiny flicker of self doubt fleetingly captured and conveyed across 400 years. I fear this has not been an objective description after all but maybe that is one of the best things about looking at art, we all bring our own experiences to our reading of the image. When we look into an image it is always in a sense a mirror in which we discover things about ourselves. In this exhibition Rachel Scott’s painful enactment of self discovery captures a similar confrontation. It may be a feminist statement about self image but it is an all too human realisation that can make a viewer of any gender empathise with the embarrassment of self recognition.
Although self portraits can be particularly empathetic, all portraits have the potential to play with our awareness of looking at others and in particular to doubling and fragmenting the self. Angelica Mesiti for example makes double portraits of a very particular type of young woman which we may read as twins or simply the same woman at different moments. There is a performative element to this structure which has parallels in early modern portraits. Digital images such as those in Face to Face are hugely manipulable; with the right software and enough imagination anything can be twisted, doubled, morphed or subtly altered to become uncanny. It seems on the surface of things to mark a radical shift in artistic expression but I do not think that this is fundamentally different from the many kinds of manipulation employed throughout the history of portraiture. Several artists in this exhibition use software to morph several identities, for example Adam Nash pixellating mother, father and son into a composite identity which is interactive and can be morphed and re-morphed by the viewer. David Rosetzky has done a manual collaged superimposition of identities then animated them digitally while Anna Munster and Michele Barker use a programme developed by Japanese markets to morph parents to provide customers with an image of what a child of their union might look like.
Artists have always played with spatial/temporal coordinates and viewing positions making the viewer an active participant in the resolution of the image. Manipulating appearances has always been at the centre of this process. In self portraits the mirror comes into play and even when the glass is flat and seemingly returning a perfect likeness the image is flipped causing some people considerable confusion. After writing an article in Art and Australia where I asserted that the self portrait gives us back an image of another that is in the same orientation as our own mirror image, I found myself in a long and fascinating philosophical exchange with Donald Brook. I had suggested that the mirror was aligned with reality while a person met face to face was back to front. By this I meant that when we look in the mirror our right hand lines up with the reflected right hand, if we reach out to touch the mirror the fingers of our mirror image touch our own. When we face another we always have to reach across diagonally to find their right hand which aligns with our left. Incidentally the mirroring of the hands is what allows for their comfortable embrace face to face as it were. We never see another as we see ourselves in the mirror except in the self portrait and potentially this is one way in which we identify with the image more intensely. Donald was of course right, when we face someone they only seem reversed because they are rotated through 180 degrees, naturally right then faces left. The mirror image is the one that lies because we see ourselves as if facing, i.e. rotated 180 degrees, and yet the alignment is direct. This is very handy when you comb your hair each day and we tend to become attuned to thinking of the mirror image as normal. Artists have had a lot of fun playing with mirrors; Artemisia Gentileschi was believed to have used several of them to allow her to paint herself from three quarters rear view. Charlie Toorop on the other hand stared directly into the mirror and painted exactly what she saw. The canvas then becomes perfectly contiguous with the mirror. The effect of that is actually hilarious since Toorop has painted an image of herself reaching out with a brush pointed directly at us as we gaze into the image of her in the mirror. Of course this figure reveals the lie of the painted mirror. The artist always has to look away from the mirror in order to be able to paint so at best she is painting her memory of what she saw moments before. If she literally painted what she saw she would in fact have smeared paint on the mirror obscuring her own image.
Richard Hamilton played with this in a complex series of self images entitled Four Self-Portraits – 05.3.81, this is a typically complex but playful work. It deconstructs the mystique of painting and originality in exchange for a very Duchampian visual conundrum. Hamilton has photographed himself from four slightly different angles in each of the four panels, suggesting the multiple viewpoints of Cubism. He then re-photographed these images through sheets of glass onto which he painted gestural marks. The visual effect of this is very similar to Mystère, Cluzot’s film about Picasso made in 1956, in which Picasso is filmed painting onto a sheet of glass from behind the glass. Hans Namuth also adopted this technique for his film of Jackson Pollock at work. Thus Hamilton uses a formulation for his own self portrait to suggest a link with two of the heroes of Modernist art.
The history of art is rich in examples of this sort including the experiments of Peter Campus with reflection and double exposure in the 1970s or Joan Jonas’ play with mirrors and video about the same time. Michelangelo Pistoletto in the 1960s also made us realize that a mirror in an art work renews the piece as each new viewer stands before it. Ian Burn also noted this and exaggerated the effect when he photographed his own mirror pieces by allowing himself, with camera, to be captured in the frame thus simultaneously unmasking the process of the mechanical eye. This entails a temporal disjunction and a fragmentation of the self. Marcel Duchamp arranged a photographic meeting of multiple images of himself sitting around a table as early as 1917. One of the most startling video doublings and disintegrations was enacted by Campus in Three Transitions 1973. He videoed himself cutting through a canvas from the back in the manner of Lucio Fontana but instead of a monochrome surface an image of his back was projected onto the front of the canvas. The resulting image was of his hand and then his whole body pushing through an expanding slash in his own back as if turning himself inside out.
William Kentridge has played with this kind of fragmentation of self in many of his works and most dramatically in a rare performance he made for the Biennale of Sydney in June 2008. In this performance he talked about Gogol’s short story The Nose in which the hero of the story wakes to find his nose is missing. It is a bizarre story for the early 19th century. This middle ranking public servant sets out to try and recover his nose, eventually he sees it in the distance dressed in the uniform of a senior officer. In spite of the terror imposed by the hierarchy in the Tsar’s public service he approaches his nose to have him return to his rightful place. The nose refuses to recognize him and claims absolute autonomy not to mention seniority. The performance moves through other literary and philosophical references ending up with the terror of life under Stalin. It is not just physical mirrors that disrupt the self, society can have similar disorienting and alienating effects as it reflects us back to ourselves in unrecognizable ways. Kentridge’s own life under the Apartheid regime in South Africa must have been just such an alienating experience.
In this live performance Kentridge deployed projections of himself making drawings with which he interacted, bridging the world of screen and real time. This seemed to be a reconstruction of his own creative process in which autobiographical narratives not only double the self but question the limits and confines of the experiencing body. In his filmed sequences of drawings and erasures things multiply and disintegrate in front of our eyes only to be drawn together again by the artist. The structure of his imaging opened up a process that seems to allow us to sense something of the complexity of selfhood and being in the world. In a way by evoking this kind of disintegration from within Kentridge provides a homeopathic remedy for the externalized disintegration caused by totalitarian regimes.
It is fascinating to realize however that these strategies for destabilizing both the perceived singularity of the subject and the viewer are a product of neither modernism nor post modernism, this is a far older strategy in art. For example in 1646 Johannes Gumpp painted himself painting his own likeness.3 The artist is seen from the back, standing in the same plane as the spectator. The mirror is shown to his left and the painting he is working on hangs on the right. The Gumpp is also notable for the way it engages the viewer in a paradoxical hierarchy of representations of the real. Almost half the painting is occupied by the back view of the artist working in the studio; his black cloak forms a large triangular area in the lower centre of the composition, as if it were a void at the bottom margin of the painting. It also acts as an arrow to point up the composition to where the action takes place. By making his own body our point of entry to the composition Johannes Gumpp underlines the role of the spectator as second beholder, standing in the place of the artist, the first beholder.
There is a subtle progression in the three images of Gumpp presented here. The cloaked figure is the largest, yet it is virtually an unrelieved black space. To the left is Gumpp’s reflection in the mirror, facing the artist we only see from the back. However, the artist does not face the mirror; he turns to look at the painting which hangs on the right, a little lower than the mirror. The mirror image thus represents a separate moment in time or his memory of what he saw before he turned back to the canvas. The painted portrait is just a little brighter and more present than the mirrored image, and, although it supposedly represents the same face captured at the same moment, instead of looking back at the artist it completes the cycle by looking over his creator’s shoulder at the spectator.
The figure of the artist at work, the one seemingly closest to the space and time to the viewer must have been painted from imagination unless he had a very complicated set of mirrors in the studio, which may partly explain why paradoxically it is the least defined of the three. The mirror, presumably a memory in the representation, is slightly shaded; the painted portrait that is the focus of the artist’s gaze is the brightest of the three. Thus we have a clever representation of various states of consciousness: imagination, memory and immanent perception that reverses the natural order of events in which the active artist looks into a mirror and only then turns to the painting.
I would contend that turning representation around and revealing its conceits and marvels is a fundamental and continuing aspect of art regardless of medium and historical period. Art is after all an exploration of what we are and how we know what we are and occasionally what we might like to pretend we are. In Face to Face the empathetic connection between viewer and the self portrait I started describing in front of a Rembrandt returns in an exacerbated way with Stelarc’s Prosthetic Head. The viewer can ask the portrait questions via a keyboard but the head speaks back its answers by drawing on an ever growing repertoire of information that grows in response to its dialogues. The first time I “spoke” with this presence I brought it to a halt by asking personal questions about Cyprus, the artist’s country of origin. It almost seemed miffed at the line of questioning. The technology is very different from Rembrandt’s but the illusion of contact with a displaced other identity is very similar.
While I have been seeking continuities across centuries it has to be acknowledged that the new technologies present very different viewing experiences. It is probably the exchange between artist and viewer and the strategies artists have always used to make us aware of our own responsibility in completing this exchange that remains the same. John Tonkin’s Muybridge like images are similar to works using mirrors in that they return the image of our own body in motion. Like artists in the Baroque, most particularly Velasquez whose animated paint forces us to duck and weave before the image, the artist is asking us to perform before the work to animate the work in much the same way as I discussed above in regard to Pistoletto and Ian Burn. Daniel Crooks’ slippages in space/time look nothing like Johannes Gumpp’s manipulation of our presumed place before the canvas and yet there is the same desire to move our attention and challenge our assumptions about truth and representation. It is true of Gumpp and Crooks and I would contend this is the most basic responsibility of all art.
Notes:
1. The term ‘self portrait’ was not used until later when the enlightenment gave a higher status to the individual and emerging ideas of selfhood.
2. Anthony Bond and Joanna Woodall preface to the catalogue Self Portrait: Renaissance to contemporary, 2005-6, National Portrait Gallery London and Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.
3. The description of Johannes Gumpp is based on my catalogue essay from the catalogue Self Portrait: Renaissance to contemporary, 2005-6 National Portrait Gallery London and Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.
© 2008 Anthony Bond
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Exhibition catalogue