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Artists - just a few notable ones:

Artists who work across media both

FILM & SOUND:

Norman McLaren - Canadian film maker and visual music maker.

Synchronomy (1971)

https://vimeo.com/29399459

Dots (1940)

https://vimeo.com/15919138

Blinkity Blank (1955) music by Maurice Blackburn

https://vimeo.com/thenfb/blinkity-blank

Won the Palme D'Or short film - better music - orchestral

Canon (1964) music by Maurice Blackburn

https://vimeo.com/53000714

An exercise in complete synchronicity with silly electronic music - animated (drawn directly onto the film) film and music by McLaren - sometimes others wrote the music. Very cute. A modern Oscar Finschinger

David Lynch - Great US director and sometime song writer

Crazy Clown Time - music video. (2012)

https://youtu.be/caWXt9lCVrc

I'm Waiting Here (2013)

https://youtu.be/3SpG7C4vHZQ

video not by Lynch

Thank You Judge (2001)

https://youtu.be/g_eDodx6uxU

Standard form music videos. Music and film by David Lynch - well, he creates his music in collaboration with other musicians much like film making - he doesn't treat it as a solo creative process.

Yannis Kyriakides - composer and sound artist and creator of music-text-films

Dreams of the Blind (2007)

http://www.kyriakides.com/dreams_of_the_blind.html

Music by Kyriakides played live to projected film of text. (Beautiful music)

See article by Kyriakides Hearing Words Written (2016)

Jerome Hill - filmmaker and composer

Portrait (USA 1972)

https://vimeo.com/26576318

A diary film made by Hill with music at least partially composed by him.

Carla Thackrah -

The Art of Sound & Sex Drugs and String Quartets (2002 & 2003)

https://vimeo.com/109761210

 

Sound and visuals by Thackrah

Created first as four Radiophonic portraits for ABC Radio, visuals were added at a later stage to create a documentary style video and sound portrait. Using traditional montage and screen style music and sound, it is a hybrid work crossing the boundaries between documentary and video/ acousmatic art.

"Thackrah is "a composer whose work challenges categorisation and media demarcation. It can be argued that these works reflect an ‘intermedia aesthetic’ in which various media and modes of presentation and engagement are utilised by the composer/creator to explore and articulate an expressive intention" (McCombe, 2006 p300)

Circus Sweet (2004)

https://vimeo.com/109794993

Sound and visuals by Thackrah

Another hybrid work crossing the boundaries between film, music video and video/ acousmatic art. using either live or  prerecorded sound/music with highly edited archival footage creating an obscure narrative with a strong emotive tone.

Thackrah’s Circus Sweet creates an intriguing collage of disparate images in which the music and soundscape suggest and evoke many layers of associative and emergent meaning. The music creates a narrative, Thackrah using the visual images to manipulate and enhance the impact of the music, while the sound and musicprovoke a variety of reactions to the visual material. The nature of the work is such that themes and concepts explored are evoked primarily through the interaction between music and image." (McCombe, 2006 p306)

ART FILM MAKERS for whom SOUND is significant

but don't work across media

Louis Andriessen & Peter Greenaway - M is for Man, Music & Mozart (1991)

https://youtu.be/q7mT4_NghpI

For singer and ensemble. Music by Andriessen and visuals by Greenaway. Commissioned by the BBC. Beautiful, high budget film incorporating shots of singer, text and highly effected visuals in typical opulent Greenaway style, and contemporary jazz influenced art music.

Angelica Mestiti - Citizen's Band (2012)

https://vimeo.com/55522269

Portraits of various musicians making their music, though Metsiti herself says they are not portraits.

"Each of the performers in 'Citizens band' has originated from somewhere other than where they currently reside. They carry their ties to their birthplace through their music: ... Mesiti is not directly concerned with creating portraits of these performers. Moving away from an emphasis on individual cultural 'actors', the participants of 'Citizens band' are brought together across space and in time to affect a wider reaching communication and developing language of emotions." Art Gallery of NSW website. Retrieved 20/02/2018 https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/201.2013/

Sound is purely diegetic recorded in situ of the musicians performing their own music.

Ten Thousand Waves - Isaac Julien 2010

https://youtu.be/0c8HH3v11jQ

Another work, like Stat d'animo, that has been re-edited in several formats to suit the exhibition space. In the 9 screen format it was shown at the 17th Biennale in Sydney.

Shown with 9.2 surround sound - presumable each speaker paired with each screen. A mix of voice over, spoken words, music, foley - much like normal film score but Julien uses the surround speakers to draw the viewer's attention to the screen he is wanting to feature.

Cows - Gabriella Golder 2002

https://vimeo.com/8160350

Highly effected and edited news video of people chopping up cows that were involved in a truck crash in Rosario Argentina.

The sound is evocative - cymbals,  loud static and an organ synthasiser sound at times beating relentlessly and suddenly dropping out into silence. A sense of extreme unease and discomfort - there's something wrong here ...

Static no. 12 (seek stillness in movement) Daniel Crook 2010

https://vimeo.com/77654682

A short film shot on high definition RED of a man practising Tai Chi in a park. As he moves the film gradually distorts, holding frames and moving them to the left, creating a fascinating distorted study on stillness in movement.

 

The sound is simple synthesiser pads with bird song and bell sounds, overlayed with vocal announcements that sound like a count down. The sound gives the work a sense of spaciousness as it has a sense of futuristic space flight. Not sure that it is highly connected to the subject matter which is essentially meditation in movement but it's not jarring.

Tupicoff Denis - Aus animator

https://youtu.be/F8CtzQ6Mqkw

Larrikan, heartfelt  animated stories with particularly good soundtracks. Made however, in the classic filmic way with narrative as first priority and sound/music there to enhance and serve the story. I find as I'm watching them, that the clever and arresting vision distracts from the sound experience.

Boustani, C. (1998) A Viagem. Germany. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRa31hoQS-M

Significant for his use of multilayered object/symbol hence meaning laden animated film. TYreated much like a poetic short film - no dialogue so the narrative relies entirely on music and foley sound by Manuel Faria.

A large production crew like a budget film.

Fairly childlike animation story.

Music sound is sophisticated with multi layered sounds ranging from foley to orchestral to vocal. Not sugnificantly different to a good film score except there is the opportunity t express more through the music because there is no dialogue or voice over.

Eisenstein, S (Director)(1938)

Ivan the Terrible. Russia. Music by Prokofiev Retrieved from https://youtu.be/-b8F0VJ5Imo

Alexander Nevsky Music by Prokofiev Retrieved from https://youtu.be/-nRev9FvsBU

Battleship Potemkin Retrieved from  https://youtu.be/V8KA6lOh79Q

10 Days that Shook the World Retrieved from https://youtu.be/goULYLW2C7o

Music by Prokofiev. Barthes does a detailed breakdown of the way music and image is placed in this film to create the third meaning, the ‘obtuse meaning’, (ie. that which cannot be described, where language ends and meaning emerges), and the ‘obvious meaning’. He was a pioneer in early film making, employing montage of music and film to create layers of meaning; that is, we have both the ‘vertical meaning’ of sound and image placement as well as the temporal meaning as the story unfolds in time.

Old and New Retrieved from https://youtu.be/-MISm-KQuwE  or https://youtu.be/XNDcHs1SDWQ

Eisenstein says this film above all others, was edited with his idea of Overtonal Montage. That is, editing based on an intuitive selection of shots not based on the dominant tone of the film rather based on the a-dominant tone or emotion that sits in that mysterious place above or below - in the unconscious. In this way, he allows the viewer to determine the meaning by process rather than having the meaning dictated by the montage.

Oskar Finschinger (1900-1967) (1938) An Optical Poem Retrieved from 

https://youtu.be/they7m6YePo

A colour and form tone poem to Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody -

Sound/music is a  fine example of complete parallelism synchronisation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Paul Mumford (Labmeta) and collaborators (2009 - ) Various audio visual artworks. Retrieved from

http://labmeta.net/projects/category/archives/

A contemporary version of Finschinger's work, Paul Mumford creates audio visual works that incorporate animation and high res film images in explicitly parallel form as well as hyper-narrative (discontinuous or deconstructed/reconstructed narrative) works. He works across contexts from high end advertising to pure art works, particularly with his own works and his collaborations with the artist Quayola.

Sound is great and usually composed by Matthias Kispert or Tim Cowie

 

 

 

 

Markopoulos, G. (1963) Twice a Man, and others. USA. Retrieved here

A ground breaking film maker whose use of fast edited cuts and complex cross fading created a layers of multiple narratives showing simultaneously. He called them thought-images or film clusters.

Sound is minimal and completely un-synchronised - rain, orchestral (romantic - Schubert, Humperdinck??), thunder - but not even the ambient or foley is related to the visual. Dialogue is spoken but not heard.

https://youtu.be/emlqA56Dzvk

Fricke, R. creator of Baraka and Samsara

 

 

Fairskye, M. (2011) Stat d' anime. Australia. Retrieved at

https://vimeo.com/149625046

 

Poetic documentary (See UTS thesis)  about airports. There are five sequences - Arrival, Crossing, Waiting, Departure and Farewell. Airports and their environs are monitored to create a sense of place that is layered with shadows, echoes and reflections. Communications between ground staff and flight crew, airport announcements, interweave with personal stories of loss and new beginnings to form “conversations” that populate the airport. The airwaves are dense with the echoes of human drama. The title references the trilogy of paintings (Stati d’Animo, 1911) by the Futurist artist Umberto Boccioni. The international airport replaces Boccioni’s railway station as the principal site of human movement - a zone of passage in which people suspend their usual lives, a place where they experience a heightened mix of emotions, and where they recall other lives in other places. The formation of the interior airport images in this work closely resembles the sequenced exposures of chronophotography by Jules Etienne Marey (1830-1904) which (like Henri Bergson’s reflections on time) inspired the painterly experiments of the Futurists that this work evokes.

A personal note on the sound - the music is unsophisticated guitar and voice - derivative folk style that is loaded with cultural meaning inappropriate to the feel and sense of the visual work. This guitar tune is repeated at times with overlays of air traffic controllers voices and location sound which works to give the film a dramatic/ narrative particularly at the end where we hear one of the flight attendants on the doomed flight 11 on 9/11.

Stati d’Animo exists in several forms – as stills, a video essay, and multi-channel and single-channel video installations.
Produced in Association with the Australian Film Commission
Produced with the assistance of Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney

Also Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery

Chris Marker - Sans Soliel (1983)

https://vimeo.com/221208520

I've only seen this short version. A series of urban shots of Japan - are they portraits - anonymous face

Sound: is good - electronic, oppressive, alienated like the images of human faces. Did Marker write it? I doubt but ...

Christine McCombe & Carla Thackrah - Fastness of Forgetting (2005)

https://christinemccombe.com/video/cross-media-works/the-fastness-of-forgetting-final/

https://vimeo.com/110229022

McCombe (composer) and Thackrah (visuals)

Unsynchronised visuals with the exception of the general languishing slowness of both the visuals and sound. The visuals suggest a narrative with the use of evocative archival images of people, letters and text across the screen rather then morphing computer graphics, so is it Visual Music or Art Film & Sound? I think it's not Visual Music but have included it here to ask that very question.

Sound is evocative, slow classical unsynched to the visual element except in pace

Art Film & Sound

VIDEO PORTRAITS with no sound or sound is minimal

Warhol, A. (1966) Screen Tests. US. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7t0fuNEdPV8&list=PLBEkEQ1LULVhl8L_N5kCnHCOEohIv-JfG   and  https://youtu.be/uenrts2YHdI

8 min long slowed footage of various subjects sitting passively in front of a camera. No sound.

 

They are not like portraits in any traditional sense. Yes, there is likeness but nothing more. The subjects show no expression so little insight is gained by the viewer into their inner psyche.

Rather they are a fine example of Baudrillard’s post structuralist Simulcra. These portraits. Like Warhol’s screen print portraits,  reveal not a real ‘self’ but rather only surface signs or simulacra in endless repetition; in the case of the film portraits, an endless repetition of frames. They are also a fine example of imposed identity in that these subjects (or are they objects?) are ‘celebrities’ with a back story we all know by virtue of our common culture. Therefore the viewer has little choice but to view these portraits with the socially imposed vision of the ‘celebrity’s’ inner world and personality.

The film and screen printed, repeated portraits of Warhol  - the "ur-postmodernist" according to Anthony Grudin (Grudin, 2014) - empty of meaning and feeling except as an expression of the surface engagement of consumer celebrity, are clearly not concerned with the traditional need to portray some manifestation of an inner identity of the sitter, however they are still very much engaged with the face as marker of the portrait for

 

Viola, B. (2000) The quintet of the astonished, and Six Heads. The Passions Series. USA. Retrieved at

https://youtu.be/MR9av-I35ME

https://youtu.be/GQuSYsFMMt4 

https://youtu.be/IEVZ1gN4fB8  

"Cameras are keepers of the Soul interview  https://youtu.be/uenrts2YHdI

In both films, Viola filmed actors displaying multiple emotions in extreme slow motion. With direct references to Renaissance paintings and thought, (Da Vinci's 'motions of the mind') the works have a Renaissance feel filmed against black background. They are a study of human inner drama. His work raises interesting questions in my mind. Could such a display of “fake’ emotions as performed by the actors really be considered portraits of an individual if there is no personal story or context within which they are played out? Are they not again like Baudrillard’s simulacra – merely copies of a reality. Would a portrait of an actor acting being someone, even if that someone is a real person, be an authentic portrait?

Sound - his passions series is silent. Other films have strong sound design - foley.

Video Portraits

Tan, F. (2004) Correction. US. Retrieved at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4CAa8Aj_1g

An installation of larger than life video portraits of prisoners in the US prison system. Her works tend to be more about subjects as universal types rather than intimate explorations of an individual psyche.

 

Tan, F. (2011) Rise and Fall. Canada. Retrieved at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEwYFbrf_N4

Multiple screens display close ups of female bodies, sitting in nature, falling water (often her videos involve water as a metaphor for movement and flux) Tan’s videos are preoccupied with notions of identity within a world increasingly shaped by global cultures. She aims to show the flux and mutability of individual identity over time. (Note to myself…something I relate to!)

 

Tan, F. (2011) Disorient. Netherlands. Retrieved at

https://youtu.be/dMhsqbmxA30

For th VEnice Biennale - Poetic documentary about Venice's trading past.

Sound is minimal - voice over of a hushed male voice reading excerpts from the travels of Marco Polo accompanying some sections on video

 

Petrina Hicks (2008) Ghost in the Shell - 1 channel video Australia

A slow scan of the camera around 360 degrees of a girl's head. Slowly emerges curls of smoke from her mouth. A metaphor for her interiority, her spirit, with a reference to Gilbert Ryle's phrase "Ghost in the machine: - a description of the duality of mind and body.

 

No sound.

 

 

 

Melita Dahl (2000) e-motion - 6 channel video Australia

Dahl draws on the focus on the expression of emotions from the 1800's writers and philosophers - Darwin, Gage, Lavater etc. She uses 6 actors to depict various emotions from sadness to laughter. Much like Bill Violas's The Passions and Arnulf Rainer. It's interesting that while the emotions offer a possible deep emotional connection to the subject, rather they offer on a mask - a play act - hiding the 'real' person behind.

Visual Portraits

VISUAL PORTRAIT ARTISTS - No sound

 

Nan Goldin & Cindy Sherman –  various self /portraits

All three explore hyperrealism in their photographic self portraits. Goldin’s self portraits are herself in raw exposure – beaten, punkish, depraved sexual encounters with herself at the centre. Baudrillard (1998) writing in The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures is evoked “the more closely the real is pursued with colour, depth and one technical improvement after another, the greater does the real absence from the world grow” (pg 122)

 

Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills appear like they are based on real Hollywood film still from the 50s and yet there are no originals. These are exactly as baudrillard speaks of – they are copies with no original.

 

Like reality TV, one questions what is real, what is performance? And if there is no private self, how is the revelation of meaning and understanding of an individual required of a portrait, possible?

 

And it is this very question that Sherman probably wants to evoke. She has chosen the genre of portraiture to make her point. In this way she can clearly reverse the usual mode of defining self and human subjectivity. We no longer see a full human self within the representation, rather we see a representation of a subject that is representing the image of a representation; the subject must by this point, be an object.

Clearly, if portraiture has in the past been seen as the place that represented to the viewer the ‘real interiority’ of an individual, it has now become the place that can best deconstruct that notion.

 

On another level, Sherman’s portraits can be seen as self portraits and yet she is not revealing her own ‘self’. We can however, muse as to what and who Sherman is who would choose to depict herself in this way? A small revelation perhaps, but, like Warhol’s Screen Tests, there is at least some limited prompt to the viewer’s imagination offered.

& Nikki S Lee - Projects and documentary AKA Nikki S Lee

As with Sherman and Goldin, Lee plays across the lines of fact and fiction to questions the way, in this 'age of mecahanical reproduction' we constructs the modern identity - particularly with all three, the constructs of women's, and in Lee's case, racial, identity. In doing so, the traditional view of portraits as mimesis - a 'true' likeness - is questioned, challenged and deconstructed. They comment on the honesty - what is reality and make believe - of the modern identity and hence on the perpetual potential for fluidity in time and space that a constructed identity allows.

https://youtu.be/oI8xpJItPVI  - interestingly, this appears to be a genuine 'factual' account of Nikki s Lee - her art and her 'self' as is this  https://youtu.be/YMychWgKedA

https://youtu.be/ZY_CApnHUp4

 

Chuck Close (1960s) - various portraits and self portraits

Close's extremes close up portraits are  less portraits of individuals than portraits of the photographs of individuals. As he himself said (1972) likeness was only a byproduct of the way he worked. (Interview in Johnson, E. H (1984) American Artists on Art from 1940-1980. New York pp160-4) The images he creates show every blemish down to individual skin pores, sweat, unevenness, creases, individual facial hairs. They are forensic in their exactness to the actual likeness of the subject (object?) that we lose the humanity of the subject; yes, they do become like an intense mug shot acting to objectify the subject. They deny us the invitation to view the subject's human interiour and in this situation their likeness becomes an irrelevance when questioning whether these are satifying portraits

Portrait Documentaries

PORTRAIT DOCUMENTARIES:

Jem Cohen - Lucky Three: An Elliot Smith Portrait

https://youtu.be/N1aLTnCja9Q

A simple, classic portrait of a musician. No words, just the musician playing and singing his songs in dispersed with images of Portland in the US - urban grime., depressing. The musician killed himself?

Sound: Just the songs being sung by the subject

Jonas Merkas (1976) Lost Lost Lost

https://vimeo.com/217911753

A classic diary film Jonas and his brother began filming in 1949 through many years gathered the footage for this long ab film.

Sound: Jonas's voice and fragments of pre-recorded music, ambient sound and little else.

Lynne Hershman - Electronic Diaries: First Person Plural (1990s)

full film

https://uts.kanopy.com/video/first-person-plural

https://youtu.be/gIn-yrDpg9U

A confessional diary about Hershman's life - Jew, abused child. Talking about identity, the title referring to the plurality of our 'selves'

Images of Hershman's face, portrait style, repeated wharhol-like.

Sound is non stop voice as Hershman recounts her story - little else.

Maxi Cohen - Anger (1986)

http://www.maxicohenstudio.com/films/anger-2/

True portraits (not self portrsits) revolving around anger. Cohen interviews people who answered an ad in NY and come in to be filmed speaking of their anger. Shot in portrait style

Sound is purely voices talking

Maxi Cohen - Intimate Interviews (1984)

http://www.maxicohenstudio.com/films/intimate-interviews/

Portraits of people talking about sex. Shot in portrait style

Sound is just the subjects talking, often quick jump cuts of image and sound

Tom Joslin - Blackstar (1976) (1:26)

https://vimeo.com/209640111

Friedrich, Su (1990) (48min) - Sink or Swim

https://youtu.be/wUHU2fXdqcQ

https://youtu.be/oJMXC8vt9L0

A classic autobiography about a young girl's relationship with her father. A series of vignettes, archival footage and other, held together with the 3rd person narration of a young gir l who speaks of 'the girl' or 'the woman'..

A film about absence - the absent father, the absent subject who is there only as a spectre - neither is she there solidly in image nor in voice -  told from the past (via 'the girl'), in the past, in the present.

Citron, Michelle. (1980) 52min Daughter Rite. Retrieved at https://youtu.be/4ZfPW6IUzyU

Hartoum Mona. (1988) Measures of Distance 16min Lebanese Retrieved at http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x31gw4

Minimal visuals, a woman's body overlaid with arabic writing. Sound is just a babble of voices and letters being read from Hartoum's mother in Lebanon.

Moffatt, Tracy. (1988) Nice Coloured Girls  24min Aus. Retrieved at https://youtu.be/Cyy_jskcR_o

Not portraits but interesting, innovative, rejecting film conventions.

Minh-ha Trinh T. (1989) Surname Vietnam 110min Viet. Retrieved at https://youtu.be/UjkuTAWQ2-E

Poetic, esoteric visuals. the 'contraversy' being that she used actors to portray the Vietnamese woman telling their stories.

Polley Sarah. (2012) Stories We Tell 110min  Retrieved at https://youtu.be/EqHtKV8GJJU

Varda Agnes (2000) The Gleaners 58min Retrieved at https://youtu.be/QpROclF3Pag

and Jacquot de Nantes (her husband)

and Beaches of Agnes Varda

see UTS library

Nice. direct Cinema (self)portraits - even the portraits that are of others, none the less Varda features prominently. Self portraits via portraits of the other.

Wiseman (1967) Titicut Follies 80min Retrieved at http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=75226

Titicut Follies by Wiseman, made in 1967, while appearing to all intents to be simply observational, was heavily criticised for the emotional violence of what he chose to film (Wiseman, 1967)

Clarke, Shirley (1967) Portrait of Jason Retrieved at https://youtu.be/t-ehssx01b0

Baillie, Bruce (1961) Mr Hayashi Retrieved at http://dai.ly/xqltf

Charming portrait - fragmented, elusive, simple footage.

Brakhage, Stan Films  (see in particular Song 15) Retrieved at

​https://youtu.be/gIRw7Kxz5rY?list=PLfTaZIagMDn6_SuMT-CzeBBKmOo8KoRCy

Shea Andrew. Portrait of Wally

http://uts.kanopystreaming.com.ezproxy.lib.uts.edu.au/video/portrait-wally?final=1

I might need to go there via UTS library

Hicks, Scott A Portrait of Glass in Twelve Parts

http://uts.kanopystreaming.com.ezproxy.lib.uts.edu.au/video/glass-portrait-philip-twelve-parts?final=1

Might need to go via UTS

What a wank!!

Kira Muratova

https://youtu.be/hUTDjstt_7o

https://youtu.be/46ywIfTRH-s

Historic Portraits

RENAISSANCE:

 

Albrecht Durer (1471-1528)

It was to Durer that I turned for influence and guidance for the first self portrait made for this PhD.

 

Durer is generally considered to have painted the first significant individual self portraits. Of course this isn't the case because self portraits were made in various forms from antiquity, however he was the centre of a flowering of self portraiture in the Renaissance. (In fact, it is Jan van Eyck who painted the first independent self portrait - his Portrait of a Man in 1433) Durer made 16 self portraits, the first he painted when he was only 13 years old. Self portraits in themselves were a sign of the changing view of identity and self that came with the dawning renaissance.

The self portrait most think of when we talk of Durer is the astounding Munich self portrait of 1500. Still 150 years before Descarte pronounced his famous statement “Cogito ergo sum” (1637) that heralded in the new philosophical discourse positing a division between reflection and body and a knowledge that the act of thinking itself marked us as separate individuals; the growing prevalence of self portraits already was marking our belief that we were distinct individuals separate from God. Durer’s self portrait of 1500, with it’s boldness, posture, luminescence and power, even goes so far as to suggest its subject is almost Christ-like himself. The creator of art stands together with the creator of the universe; no longer in an inferior position but boldly present; a fitting mark to the growing status of the artist during the Renaissance as well as to the changing body of philosophical thought that was beginning to centre around our identities as individuals rather than merely part of God’s universe.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hans Holbein (1497-1543)

Holbein dominated English portrait painting until the arrival of Van Dyke; both painters in the finely executed and observed Northern renaissance school. He was notably the official portrait painter employed by Henry VIII. As such, his paintings were beautifully clear portrayals of status and power.  The beautiful portrait of  Edward V1 as a child and Anne of Cleves, Henry’s prospective bride, were notable by their idealised but, one would imagine, still fine drawn likeness.  The Ambassadors, in the National Gallery in London, is one that is particularly notable for my research. The work, while on the one hand clearly seems to offer a fine likeness, includes in the huge portrait on the other hand, many props and symbols and a fantastical distorted skull, all pertaining to the subjects’ and Western Europe’s in general, growing fascination during the Renaissance, of anatomy, science and learning.  It is the over abundance of these signs and symbols used as markers for the viewer to gain a deeper understanding of the subjects’ preoccupations, status, and so, in Renaissance terms, deeper individual identities, that most interest me; it is almost an encyclopaedic list of who they are.

 

 

Velaquez (1599-1660)

Las Meninas; a painting so rich in the ‘third meaning’, the dark corners that hide a story yet to be discovered. At once a self portrait, a portrait of royal power and a revealing portrait of an intimate moment in time. The subjects, including the painter himself, stand watching; who has entered the room, what are they looking at, what is in each of their minds as this moment plays itself out? Part of this power is a twist in the tail because while in that moment it is the King who has walked into the room, it is in our time, actually us, ourselves, who have just walked into the room at the Prado museum and seen this giant of a painting. Is it ourselves they see? As viewers, we don’t need to know. The power of the portrait lies in the fact that it elicits so many stories in our imaginations that we can come to know each person almost as well as if we were there. (And in fact, we are there!) Because after all, how real is our personal knowledge of anyone? Always it can only be seen through our, the viewers’, imaginations.

 

 

Rembrandt (1606-1669)

Rembrandt’s self portraits seem to offer tangible proof that Western culture was moving toward a deeper focus on their inner selves. Each of Rembrandt’s self portraits show a man with a variety of faces, each contemplating its individual existence in the moment of being captured in paint. The world, by now, is really beginning to embrace the idea that our inner natures are intimately and infinitely our own.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From the French Revolution to Modern Era (1790 1900):

 

France undoubtedly dominated the painted portrait in this era. Jacques Louis David, Manet, Ingres, Renoir, Cezanne, Toulouse-Lautrec up to Gauguin and particularly Van Gogh. With Van Gogh, we begin to first see what seems to be, a sense of an individual’s vulnerable psychosis revealed in painted form. He was an avid self portraitist (and in essence, it feels that all his later portraits and paintings, were in fact self portraits as each painting reveals the inner turmoil of his emotional state) I look at his self portrait in the Louvre painted in 1889. In his intense use of colour and brush stroke, we see a sense of the mania and agitated distress that plagued his psyche. It was the era of the birth of psychoanalysis with Freud qualifying as a doctor in the same year and his mentor Josef Breur treating Anna O, essentially the first patient treated with the new radical method of psychoanalysis. Van Goghs’s mental suffering as expressed via portraiture was paralleled in the paintings of the expressionists.

 

 

 

 

 

Picasso's Gertrude Stein

It was probably Picasso's Portrait of Gertrude Stein, that was the beginning of the suppression of the mimetic imperative for portraiture. The face was a mask and yet it still bore the hallmarks of a portrait - an outline of hands, face and body. Even in Picasso's Portrait of Stein there is still much information to marks it as a portrait... there is still an "analogical plenitude" as Barthes calls it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Munch’s iconic and much parodied “The Cry” (1893) has to be mentioned because of it’s obvious correlation to the changing view of the inner ‘self’ as Freud and Jung’s work and theories of the inner workings of the psyche took hold in western thinking.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Modern Era 1900 - 2000

Max Beckman (1844-1950),

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Egon Shiele (1890-1918),

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oskar Kokashka (1886-1982) bridged the gap in portrait painting until we reach the World War II and post war era dominance of the USA where post modern ideas of identity influence, deconstruct and subvert the potrait genre. We come to Sherman, Close, Goldin, Emin, Warhol etc.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Francis Bacon Three Studies of Isobel Rawsthorne (1967)

This painting could be seen as an allegory on the nature of portraiture. In one canvas he touches on reality and representation; inside and outside, mimesis and destruction of the mimetic subject by the act of  ‘nailing them down’ or as Barthes writes “I feel that the photograph creates my body or mortifies it” (Camera Lucida)

Via the rendering of the subject in three way – within the canvas as a traditional subject, whilst nailing herself to the wall; as a subject emerging or disappearing or being locked in or out behind a partially closed door; and as a portrait already nailed to the wall - Bacon portrays the act of portraying as an act deeply layered within the complexities of the human subject, representation, nailing, mortifying and objectifying. No answers are offered, merely questions raised.

 

(Note to self - Artists still to be explored Picasso, Francis Bacon, Chuck Close, Alice Neel, etc…

 

Adami, Valerio, (1973) Retratto di Walter Benjamin

The portrait, by Valerio Adami, shows Benjamin turned away and decentred, not whole, with the name 'Benjamin' in the centre and complete. Hence Derrida says:

"When the face begins to disappear, or as here, no longer to occupy the top of centre, the legend becomes necessary... Disappeared is the subject. What has disappeared appears, absent in the very place of the commemorative monument, returning to the empty place marked by his name. Art of the cenotaph." (Derrida, 1987)(178)

Derrida in his work The Truth in Painting, devotes a chapter to the portrait of Walter Benjamin in which he speaks at length 'around' the title of the portrait, Retratto di Walter Benjamin and the phenomena that is created because the portrait names an author whose text has become a legend; that is Walter Benjamin's seminal work "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" which becomes in relation to the portrait, "a dependent piece played, analysed, interpreted by the portrait. Which nonetheless, looks at the author"

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