Question: While mimetic representation has formed the basis of high art portraiture for centuries, as we move forward into the 21st Century, this way of portraying has become increasingly problematic. The postmodern portrait has moved far from the classic definitions, to a place that questions the traditional markers of 'good' portraiture by deconstructing the concept of the existence of a solid identity that has its outward manifestation in the face and body of the sitter; a 'good likeness' to a sitter's face or bodily form is neither a necessary precondition nor a guarantee of a true reality within a work of portraiture.

How can the temporal, non-representational art of music/sound, hitherto neglected in traditional portraiture, step into the field of representation to extend the possibilities for portraiture?

 

I will attempt throughout my dissertation and creative portraits, to offer another perspective on portraiture in the 21st Century. I will be exploring the well-travelled road of historic portraiture - a portrait tradition that placed particular emphasis on the representation of identity through mimetic portrayal. The journey will follow the trace of portraiture as it developed in tandem with ideas of identity and the exploration will carry on through and past the age of mechanical reproduction into the digital age of reproduction and proliferation of time-based music/sound and documentary film image. It is here that contemporary ideas of identity demand a subverting of the traditional mimetic re-presentation of the past.

 

Proposition: The digital time-based realm gives portrait artists resources that, throughout its history, have not been on offer. The addition of sound and music to film image manipulated via montage, extends the traditional canvas for the portrait artist and this is the most obvious area to address in my research and creative work; that part of human expressiveness that has been neglected in traditional portraits to date. While the eyes have long been considered the 'windows to the soul' as the multitude of portraits paying homage to this maxim attest, with time based sound/music, the auditory world that the ears perceive can fill a gap in portraiture that has hitherto been neglected. Therefore a significant addition to portraiture will be the time-based realm of sound and music.

 

Portraiture in the visual and film arts, since the mid 20th Century, has been significantly transmuted by post-structural thinking to question the very nature of reality, truth and authenticity in the 21st Century. Historical arguments around all these areas have been based on the Cartesian model of reality - a duality of the external world outside ourselves on the one hand and our subjective perception of that reality - a conviction of reality as something that exists 'out there' that can be perceived and conveyed truthfully via language and art. Post-modern thought has radically de-constructed this prevailing idea and it has touched all the creative fields and scholarship. Theorists have questioned the very nature of reality, truth and authenticity as we perceive it and postulated instead a reality that is fluctuating, de-centred or even non-existent. Visual art portraiture and documentary, attempting as they are to portray truth or reality, are particularly vulnerable to this de-construction and have become prime places for subversion of their traditional model.

 

Music/sound, however, has always been recognized to be a peculiarly non-representational art, because it lacks the reference characteristic of words and images; that is, as a signifier or sign that stands for some other thing outside of itself. It is this essential characteristic of music and sound that holds the potential to place it front and centre in a portraiture whose sole imperative can no longer be to represent a tangible identity whose outward manifestation is in the face of the subject, but rather might be found in the intangible, uncanny, morphing sonorous event.

 

My research, will explore the proposition that by prioritising music and sound and incorporating its contribution into portraiture, one can ameliorate the vulnerability encountered by visual portraiture - both visual art and documentary - in its attempts to convey the truth of an individual, offering an ideal place to situate, in partnership with the visual and other texts, a depiction of a post-modern, fluctuating, fragmented and decentred identity.

 

___________________

 

 

“Is it a preconception derived from habit to suppose that the soul and the heart are in the same category and can only be negotiated through the face? Isn’t it common to find a single book or poem or record that communicates with the heart more profoundly than a hundred years of scanning faces?” Kobe Abe (1966) “The Face of Another” (Abe, 1966)

 

Certainly it is to the face, throughout the history of man as artist, that we have given that singular distinction – it is the one thing above all others that we assume encapsulates our essential identity and communicates it to the world.

 

And yet, as Kobe Abe so eloquently states in the quote above, there is so much more that we could be looking to in order to discover where resides and where could be revealed our ‘essential’ natures. In fact, he says, the face, even if we scanned them for a hundred years, will be a poor communicator of who we are.

 

For instance, on a simple level, we could look to the body that supports the face, the body’s movement as well as the space and sounds it inhabits. We could also look, as Abe suggests, to the works of creation - the music, vision and words an individual produces, their creative fingerprint; we could look to medical science to see another form of portrait – our actual fingerprints, our DNA, our medically scanned body.

 

And on a deeper level again we could be questioning the very existence of that essential identity - that "soul and heart"-  in each human being; is there, in fact, anything real to be represented or is every moment of reality, including our essential selves, merely a "model of a real without origin or reality" a "simulcrum" as Jean Baudrillard contends. (Baudrillard, 1988)

 

A dark view indeed but one that perhaps sums up the world of virtual identities, avatars and the multitude of 'selfies' and profile pictures on social media, the photo-manipulated reproduced images, the "fake news" photos and "alternate facts" of personal and social narratives - the endless circuit of simulcra that are the hyperreal, edifice of reality in the 21 Century.

 

So I ask again - What is a portrait? Does it have to have a face?

 

Portraits are an art form that everyone is familiar with. From the stick figures of aboriginal cave paintings and children everywhere; the primitive featureless forms of Neanderthal man's carvings, through to the spirit catching Egyptian tomb portraits; the perfect idealised forms of Greek and Roman portraits to the Renaissance when modern portraiture as we know it began; we can all offer a simple definition of a portrait that fits each and every one of these eras. In each of these, the portrait refers, in bodily form, to a human being, either real or imagined, that in some way exists outside the portrait.

 

Richard Brilliant offers a classic definition of a portrait “Fundamental to portraits as a distinct genre in the vast repertoire of artistic representation is the necessity of expressing (an) intended relationship between the portrait image and the human original” (1991) A similar definition comes from Marcia Pointon that portraits are the representation of “an individual known to have lived, depicted for his or her own sake. Some might add that a portrait should aim to represent body and soul, or physical and mental presence” (2013)(pg48) Cynthia Freeland concurs with this definition defining a portrait as “a representation or depiction of a living being as a unique individual possessing

​

1. A recognisable physical body along with

2. An inner life. That is, some sort of character and/or psychological or mental states” (2010)(pg 5)"

 

Van Alpen (1977) brings the artist of portraits into the definition – both the portrayer and the portrayed exist as an original reality and as this double act, they create a special relationship that increases the ‘being’ both of the represented and the representation. It is the double act itself that authenticates the portrait; the mode of representation that makes us as viewers believe that the signified (sitter) and the signifier (portrait) form a unity that conveys a true reality.

 

It is into the mid 20th Century however, that such simple definitions begin to become particularly problematic and much debated largely because the portrait genre, in its imperative to convey an authentic likeness of the sitter both in their inner psyche and external features, must raise questions about who we truly are; what is it artists are trying to portray? The portrait as a genre has become the perfect place to deconstruct and subvert prior thinking about the definition of the self and disrupt the Cartesian model of a stable inner self, that had been the central tenet of psychological thinking since the Renaissance. Mimetic representation of the sitter in a portrait seemed to offer a factual view of the human individual, a view that was both corporeal and psychological and yet this 'good likeness' this 'copy', offered no proof of its authority. More often than not, the viewer had never seen the sitter in real life, and knew them intimately even less; often they are individuals from the past, long dead, who are presented to the viewer as fact. This was the genre most open to artists to explore, subvert and deconstruct.

 

With abstraction and impressionism (Picasso, Matisse), the expressionists Kokoshka, Munch, Beckman, Sheile; through to Post Modern portraitists, Sherman, Lee, Warhol, Close, Bacon, Tan; the rise of the technology of reproduction and Post Modern theories of identity, the creation of one’s face and body image has become trivialised. After all, a face that can be changed with plastic surgery or digital manipulation, makeup and even hair style can hardly be believed as truth. The developments in science, too, play their part - no portrait of a face that can be so easily manipulated can compete with the inarguable DNA test. No longer does society see our face, our external images, as revealing. Rather, the contemporary portrait has moved far from the classic definitions, to a place that questions the traditional markers of 'good' portraiture by deconstructing the concept of the existence of a solid identity that has its outward manifestation in the face and body of the sitter.

 

This is the very dilemma I will be exploring in both my written and creative work: While mimetic re-presentation has formed the basis of high art portraiture for centuries, as we move forward into the digital 21st Century, new possibilities open for portraiture. How can the time-based realm of digital sound and image embody the traditions and ambitions of portraiture and carry them through to create meaningful and satisfying portraiture for the 21 Century?

 

I will attempt throughout my dissertation and creative portraits, to offer a new perspective on portraiture in the 21st Century. I will be exploring the well-travelled road of historic portraiture - a portrait tradition that placed particular emphasis on the re-presentation of identity through mimetic portrayal. The adventure will follow the trace of portraiture as it developed in tandem with ideas of identity and the exploration will carry on through and past the age of mechanical reproduction into the digital age of reproduction and proliferation of time-based music sound and film image. Here we meet contemporary ideas of identity that demand a subverting of the mimetic re-presentation of the past, the 'good likeness', and instead engage in the digital canvas of extended moments of time, sound, space and light.

 

I will be questioning what is it that acts as a catalyst to convey a meaningful or at the least, satisfying sense of an individual in a portrait. Is it even possible to do this?

 

I return to the question - to face or not to face? To re-present or not to re-present a bodily form? Is the face the window to the soul?

​

It is rare indeed, even in the post-modern 21st Century, to find a portrait without at least some manifestation of a bodily part, and more usually it is a face. Cindy Sherman's portraits, for example, while they are images of the artist herself, are not actually 'her' - Cindy Sherman. In fact they are simulcra in the true sense, with no reality outside the image. None the less they are in the classic form of a portrait - face, body, expression clearly portrayed - and while there is much debate as to whether they are self portraits, most contend that they are undeniably portraits because the image, with face and body, so clearly sits within the form of a portrait.

 

Here is a portrait by Felix Gonzales-Torres (1991) which is a pile of sweets wrapped in cellophane placed in the corner of the gallery. It tells us a simple story of Ross - sweet, colourful, much loved, has been, if not lives, in LA; one part of Ross's character. Clearly there is no face here and in fact the only way we would know it to be a portrait is because it is tellingly and necessarily titled "Portrait of Ross in LA