peter nesteruk (home page: contents and index)
Portraits
Of the
face, and the stare that resides within it - or the absence of this stare. This residence the mark of consciousness (our modern way of
paraphrasing the older notion of the windows of the soul). And with
consciousness the ocean in which it swims, the irresistible current it must
follow; of temporality in painting. In the genre that privileges and compresses
their combination into the presence of a single face: the Portrait.
Face on:
apart from the hands (culture depending) the face is the one part of the human
body (sex and culture depending) which remains naked, exposed as indispensable
to identification, recognition, and communication. Every feature (ornaments
included) found to be readable, interpretable, scrutinised for signs of
presence, signs of intention; combinations infinite. Full on: (like a full moon
centre-field, centre-screen, taking up the space of central focus, hypnotic in
its demand for our full attention). But the portrait does not demand that we
act as if we are being read in turn (we are permitted to drop our visual manners,
the etiquette of exchanged stares is absent, there is no exchange - or at least
none between minds, our own identity continues in its endless quest to bargain
time and objects for self).
Stare:
(looking back, look averted (gendered looks)). Above all zones of the face it
is the eyes that offer most to the politics of interpretation. With return of
stare or not, not-withstanding, we understand from the nature of the look the
character of the transfigured, the pious, the convivial, the successful and the
downright arrogant (‘full of self’). Or the character we are supposed to assume
is hiding there, waiting behind the curtains of the eyes for our recognition; a
bluff become double-bluff in the case of a pose paid for by the hour – a
performance with one eye on the clock. Potential contexts: the history of the
painted eye from Giotto to Rembrant, from Caravaggio
to Paula Rego. Offering a range of expressions we
might want as templates for ourselves; an armoury of masks, of the peg, a
training ground in the school of self-image, a select range of ‘look’ (all
by-and-large positive, this is not journalistic photography where the face of
disaster is sought to illustrate the hideous fact). The eyes have it.
Silence:
the silence of the portrait is also the silence of the voyeur (and we are all
in love with our visual sense). For the making of a portrait, the rendering of
a likeness, is
also to render someone dumb.
The image
is speechless; it speaks otherwise. The pose of the sitter must therefore be
suitable to silence; otherwise they would render themselves (be rendered)
laughable… The portrait somehow functions, even glories, in the absence of the
most important form of human communication (there is also the absence of touch
– but this realm of social experience is anyway always heavily tabooed; witness
the latent violence and brittle erotics of touch in
the case of contact between strangers).The image is speechless; it must be made
to speak otherwise. This lack of speech leaves all to
visual cues, to realms of human comprehension and experience dependant upon the
eye and its memory. The visual imagination (and its unconscious, a social as
well as a personal unconscious) must take over the guiding of the other senses:
not least that of speech (how rarely do we think of smell before a picture).
For the portrait only encourages our tendency to make a mental paraphrase
everything. Words may describe, summarise, provide a suitable narrative setting
(a temporal trajectory) but they also play games with the image; punning and
seeking out the possibilities of the rebus.
Portraits
are always iconic (although not always in the semiotic sense). Making sainted; presenting the ideal and so the immortal, as well
as representing the merely mortal, the real, the privilege of the mimetic
(warts and all in portraits with critical attitude or in certain low-life
picaresque genres). Part message to the future (continued existence
within a given quantity of time), part claim on status as an eternal
(qualitative shift of identity), the suggestion, the
ever-present suspicion is that a not-so-surreptitious attempt at immortality is
part of the rationale of the commissioning of the Portrait. A link to the
afterlife maintained this side. When the past coincides with the shades of
eternity, and memory with the fires of the sacred, and when the soul and limits
of our belief find their symbolic place in a picture of a deceased mortal, then
we begin to comprehend the power of the historical portrait. Portraits are our
form of ancestor worship.
(And just
like the ruin, whose rhetoric it closely follows, the portrait in its reference
to temporal frailty is ultimately just another prompt for the realm of last
things; or for those who have captured the right to speak for this realm; an
agent for their institutions.)
(Portraits;
our claim to a pre-emptive posthumous survival has become the means of
propaganda for the system that represents the promise of that survival).
Possession
and the Portrait. Divided among many
realms. Claimed by many hands, earth-bound and
ghostly. Operating on a number of levels simultaneously: as thing, as
memory (as a prompt for the past); as commodity, as exchangeable item (as cash
or for other sacred objects); as a prop for identity, a bid for status (recognition,
the portrait as cultural capital). The portrait is an investment (always a
temporal matter) in realms both economic and spiritual; both of which will
yield returns on the exchange of the object and the identity of the subject.
Either way an investment of the self is involved (at the very least of ones
resources, ones time) in a fusion of soul and object, identity and matter. In
the matter of the portrait we have a case of spirit possession: possession of
the other (of memory) and so, by means of this other, possession of the self -
we are in this way haunted, by the other, by the images of others, as much by
necessity as by choice… Portraits are the paintings of ghosts we look to for
the veiling of our own constitutional evanescence.
Possession
and genre (landscape, family dwelling, domestic scene, family portrait, still
life, the genres of possession) with the portrait as the fore-most genre of
self-possession.
Degrees
of presence. Let us compare the portraiture of Gwen and
Augustus John. She, offering the evaporation of presence as presence
reconfirmed (the board beneath the paint is what is shining through, the source
of the light that transforms the place/face in the frame). He,
foregrounding the individual as the presence of a unique expression. She, conjuring all through a relative absence of expression in a
confluence of serenity and absence. He, offering the
illusion of the moment. She, the illusion of all time,
the timeless (in the two modalities of the present; the moment and the eternal
now). Now with the dated aspect of these paintings functioning as extra
support for this effect, history joins technique in creating the aura of
timelessness.
At the
other end of the spectrum: degrees of
physicality/unwanted verisimilitude (inheritor of the critical ‘distortion’, or
the brutalism of the low-life picaresque). The offering up of a brute fact, of
every last degree of physicality, now poses as authenticity, as (the
‘unvarnished’) truth. In actuality a form of illusionism, the reproduction (or
creation) in paint and photography of such, often repugnant, physical detail or
texture - increasingly now in pixels rather than on photographic plates or
paper - is offered in the name of realism. It is precisely the verisimilitude
that is wanted (the object depicted is a means to the end of this quest for the
Grail). The naïve desire for a direct and unmediated materiality is responsible
for the creation of the most hideous (most abject) forms and textures of the
human face. This coarseness or base materiality is opposed to the realm of
spiritual refinement, of idealisation, of the least degree of physicality. This
binary is itself a matter of course fiction.
(The
other illusion is the one where the present becomes the pre-sent, the
before-image; as the putative reality beyond representation. The rhetoric on
offer is the rhetoric of the portrait as part of the illusionism of
illusionism; the illusionism of having gone beyond the sending of signs.
However becoming the sign of the pre-sent still only leaves us among the signs
of the present).
The
time of the portrait. Of portraiture taken as
a genre and its form of temporality in general. An act of preservation,
a performance of the timeless, of the face, of its expression, a source of
ideal types, ideal of self behind the ideal self (presented at its best, as
preferred); a memento of self (and of others, as any memento of self, to
others, is a mark of the Other). Face as humanity; as mark of our commonality,
as Being, inter-subjectivity incarnate; therefore the technique and rhetoric of
the transcendent associated with its presentation. The mark of the pure unique
individual becomes the sign of the essence of the collective, where the
fullness of the former suggests its extrapolation to all individuals (like the
relationship between the eternal present and the rhetorical presence of
eternity); but is usually only found to apply to those considered worthy, or
capable, of such fullness and is in turn a mark of their recognition and
identity (their rank). A sense of community drawing on the rhetorical power of
the All, mark of totality, numerical correlate to eternity, is in this way
delimited to the Some, with the force of the former
still in play to enhance the status of the latter. The light in all, on
examination, often becomes the light to be found in some only…
The
Portrait in Time (I). The Past, Present and
Future. The present, stored, frozen, painted, inscribed becomes the
image of the past recorded, to be called up, as model, as ideal, to be an
inspiration to later generations, to its viewers (or so someone would have
liked, once, once upon a time, to believe) a guide to the future, in the
future…
The
Future. From the future;
potential source of unknown unimaginable readings, hitherto undreamt of
appropriations that may yet arrive (gift of the forward horizon of time)
alongside the predictable and the normative (gift of the immortal as lawgiver).
In the future …in the future which by definition is that which never comes,
that which is always trapped in the future, non-arrival defined; foreclosure
certain. This future (our sense of the future as such) is the true forward wall
in the face of the present, the wall we call our vision, our screen of sight, a
screen (like the iconostasis of the Orthodox church)
lined with portraits. Behind which…?
The
Portrait in Time (II). The present as citation in the present;
re-citation, the tug between past and present, as the present readership takes
over more and more of the picture for their own use. Finding from their own time
(and in their own time) the necessary experiential analogues to answer the
needs of their own comprehension recognition and desire… becoming in this way
part of our present culture, part of our lives, our current obsessions… so
transcending the historical aspects of the genre (the historical portrait) and
its status as historical artefact.
The Past. The portrait as door to the past. A door
which perhaps only really opens for historical researchers. Creatures
leading double lives, virtual selves, temporal doppelgänger, moving strangely in
parallel, moving in an unfamiliar virtual past – strange echo of the present. Somehow never quite free of the flavours of the present and its
cultural fashions. A second home, a shadow home, a half-built,
half-empty house into which the portrait is placed. Yet this is an unhappy
lodging. The unhomely quality of this new home, of
the past, is due, not to its outlandish customs, but rather to its unwanted
familiarity. And this we cannot escape. For it is always a
past reconstructed: a product of our metaphysics of the face, our ideologies of
the self, our cultures of gender. If the past is recognised to always
carry irreducible traces of the present, then the (re)creation can take place
on honest ground (a groundless ground as far as the past is concerned, for no
matter how many artefacts are left, or even how many signs, the context of
interpretation, the final grounding, is always now). We do not, after all, have
recourse to a time machine for a final empirical verification. A door to the
past opened by what remains… What remains? Matter and image; support and sign,
artefact and representation, chemistry and illusion; with the fragile coating
that makes up the second term in this series as the source (or prop) of our
musings and recreations. Then, if fortunate, we may witness the slow
evaporation of the vivid returned in art, of persons returned in portraiture…As
thin, tepid, delicate and artificial as memory itself; and (almost) as
persistent (we may look away, or put away, the two dimensional image, but some
things can never be forgotten…).
Therefore
no present (all the original presents have become past) save only the present
of our experience, our present, with the portrait as realisation in this
present; our present, which we do not see ending; only the eternal present.
The
Eternal Present. As a time beyond time; here the rhetoric
of eternity is brought into play. Let us take as our example Gwen John’s light
evaporating the image. The particular is caught breaking-up in the light of the
general, the illumination burning through from beneath. Portraiture posed on
the point of balance between two realms… the overlap of the temporal and the
eternal manifest in a single face. Such portraiture partakes of the benisons of
both worlds, in a blessing erasing presence into light. Were saints and martyrs
ever painted in such a moment of transformation? The interior light of the
sacred, the backlit character of stained glass is reproduced in paint.
As living rituality takes place outside of the space
of ritual, so repetition is the first degree of ritual (as identity, the end,
is the second, and eternity, the means – although represented as the end in
intense forms- is the third). As a sign, the portrait already is repetition;
its use, temporality and identity function (observed above) reveal it as ritual
image, as ritual. The ritual possession which results makes of portraits a
microcosm, a mis-en-abime,
or part /whole relation, of the process of identity-making and its supports.
Indeed our relation to images as such (whence the logic of the iconoclasts)
produces this conferral. The slower the image flow, the more persistent its
call upon us; the more slowly we peruse a given image, the greater its
constitutive force; the more profound our fusion; its role in our confirmation,
its transformation into a sacred object which comes to represent us (which
becomes us by metonymic extension). The portrait as ritual;
given image as graven image; most precious palimpsest.
Mute
witness to our narcissistic folly.
Transubstantiation
observed.
Copyright 2002 Peter Nesteruk