In Your Face
Art News Article:
http://www.artnews.com/2007/06/01/in-your-face/
In Your Face
BY PERNILLA HOLMES POSTED 06/01/07
Portraiture has become increasingly
conceptual as it addresses not only
personal identity but also issues of
politics, social inequity, and our
obsession with celebrity.
Kehinde Wiley, Philip the Fair, 2006, portrays an
anonymous black man in a Houston Astros jersey set
against a French Provincial design. The connection with
Philip the Fair derives from a medieval stained-glass work
featuring the treacherous king.
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND DEITCH PROJECTS, NEW YORK
In her show last spring at Greene Naftali Gallery in New
York, Rachel Harrison exhibited bright-colored, roughhewn sculptural representations of famous people—Cindy
Sherman, Johnny Depp, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Al Gore
(2007) took shape as a big, vertical block with a stuccolike
dappled pink, green, and red surface with a dial
thermometer stuck on one side. The Gore depicted here is
not the politician, but rather the Oscar-winning director,
celebrity author, and evangelist for saving the planet.
Harrison’s show—titled “If I Did It” in reference to O. J.
Simpson’s unpublished book—revealed how our views of
people and the world are contoured by mass media.
Harrison is one of many contemporary artists making
portraits that are often not even recognizable as such.
“Portraiture is going through something of a renaissance,
with a steadily developing conceptual line,” observes Sarah
Howgate, curator at London’s National Portrait Gallery.
Many artists now use portraits to comment on larger
issues, such as individual identity, social inequities,
politics, celebrity obsession—and the genre of portraiture
itself. But where artists like Sam Taylor-Wood and
Elizabeth Peyton have tended to venerate icons of their
generation, today’s younger artists have become more
concerned with the effects on celebrities of media
manipulation and unrelenting attention. “Artists working
with portraiture these days are usually using it as a foil,”
says Tom Eccles, executive director of Bard College’s
Center for Curatorial Studies. “They’re more quoting from
portraiture.”
One novel investigation into the way celebrity and cultural
memory intersect is Keith Edmier’s installation Keith
Edmier and Farrah Fawcett (2000). Edmier invited
Fawcett, who also makes art, to collaborate with him; each
made a sculpture of the other as a nude. Edmier portrayed
Fawcett as a reclining marble figure, looking as he
remembered her from the 1970s TV series Charlie’s
Angels. Fawcett, who had no prior knowledge of Edmier,
cast him as a standing figure in bronze as she saw him, but
she idealized his features. Together the sculptures, shown
at Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York, expose how
fantasy and reality mix in our perceptions.
In the right context, a famous person can stand for a
generation, just as that generation’s view can define the
person. In an effort to capture celebrities through their
audiences, South African artist Candice Breitz, who is
represented by White Cube in London and Sonnabend in
New York, made video portraits of Bob Marley (Legend),
Madonna (Queen), and Michael Jackson (King)—all
2005—and of John Lennon (Working Class Hero) in
2006. In none of these does the subject actually appear.
Working Class Hero is a 25-channel video installation
showing 25 fans, all singing Lennon’s 1970 debut solo
album, Plastic Ono Band, in sync from beginning to end.
Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno (represented by
Gagosian and Friedrich Petzel, respectively) took a more
direct approach in their film Zidane: A 21st Century
Portrait (2006), which was made before the French soccer
star’s famous head-butting incident at the World Cup.
They used 17 cameras to track Zinédine Zidane through a
single game, focusing on him exclusively. We see him
spitting, frowning, placing his hand on his hip, and
occasionally springing into action. The sound track shifts
from fans to commentators to silence. The real dramatic
moment occurs when Zidane cracks an uncharacteristic
smile.
“The Zidane film really tackles how you make a portrait
today,” says Nancy Spector, curator of contemporary art at
the Guggenheim Museum in New York. “It’s about using
today’s media and popular culture. It’s not traditional—it’s
constantly moving. It creates a psychological portrait.”
Reality TV shows, in which participants more actively
reveal themselves, offer another kind of psychological
rendering. In his documentary film the return of the real
(2005), which was short-listed for the 2006 Turner Prize,
British artist Phil Collins invited former guests on talk and
makeover shows who felt their lives had been ruined by
the appearances to tell their stories at a press conference
he set up in Turkey. He hired a Turkish reality-show
director to interview each participant. By putting these
people in the limelight, Collins makes the ethics of
exploitation and the audience’s interest in it the subject of
his portraits.
Collins, who shows at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New
York, also creates video portraits in which politics, youth,
and pop culture intersect. For each work, he sets up a task:
in they shoot horses (2004), Palestinian teens participate
in an eight-hour dance-a-thon, and in baghdad screentests
(2002), filmed during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq,
40 Iraqi youths audition for a nonexistent Hollywood film.
These young people from regions defined by political strife
behave like teens anywhere. Collins’s video is an
uncontrived portrait of the people behind the headlines.
Homing in on media representations and their distortions,
French artist Valérie Belin and Japanese artist Kazuna
Taguchi each consider the ways in which women are
idealized in popular imagery. They examine its effects on
how they see themselves and how they are perceived.
For her 2006 series “New Faces (Portraits),” Belin, who
shows in Paris with Galerie Xippas and in New York with
Sikkema Jenkins & Co., hired 12 young models, 6 men and
6 women, selected from the catalogues of top Paris
modeling agencies. The models’ skin in the photographs is
made up and flawless, and Belin uses light to create a flat,
two-dimensional impression of almost supernatural
beauty.
Taguchi, who is represented by Tokyo’s Taro Nasu Gallery,
cuts up images of women that she finds in fashion
magazines, scans them together, paints on them, and then
rephotographs them to achieve seamless portraits of
composite ideals. The effect is akin to seeing someone who
has had too much cosmetic surgery—the parts are all in
place, but something is not quite right. Both artists
consider how people measure themselves against these
standards.
German-born Conceptual artist Oliver Herring also makes
composites, but to different ends. His recent show at Max
Protetch in New York featured three-dimensional
sculptures, which he made by collaging photograph
fragments of individual people. The almost cubistic
representations reveal different information from various
angles. Herring also lets people portray themselves (you
are what you do) through tasks and games that they
perform. For example, he has them spit food dye onto
their bodies and clothes as if they were canvases. They do
so for hours, until they are exhausted, and then Herring
documents those moments.
Performance is also a component of German artist Olaf
Nicolai’s work, which examines stereotypes and personal
aspirations. For Blond, a piece he first made in Tilburg, the
Netherlands, in 2003, he opened a hair salon for one
month and invited people to get a bleach job free of
charge. He advertised in local papers and put in the salon’s
windows images of famous blonds, including, of course,
Andy Warhol, as well as images from artworks in which
blond is a key concept. Nicolai, who is represented by
Galerie EIGEN + ART in Berlin and Leipzig, took beforeand-after shots of each person, though he only shows the
after shots—the achievements—which look like standard
school yearbook photos.
Photographer Vivan Sundaram, one of India’s most
distinguished artists, considers personal identity in the
context of ancestry. He examines his own background in
the series “Re-take of Amrita” (2001–4), based on old
photos of his aunt Amrita Sher-Gil, a famous painter who
died at age 28 in 1941. Sundaram shows digitally
manipulated photos of her as a child, a teenager, and a
young woman in Paris. The artist’s hand becomes evident
when his aunt appears twice in the same frame in different
outfits, or when her homes in Paris and India overlap, or
when she is depicted years after her death with her parents
as elderly people. Sundaram creates a world where past
and present coexist. He examines how his family history is
interwoven with that of modern India, and how even his
own decision to become an artist was entwined with his
heritage.
New Yorker Brian Alfred seeks to convey his own identity
in terms of people he chooses to associate with. Since 2005
he has been working on head-shot paintings of people he
admires—from his wife and friends to musicians, artists,
and people he has never met—often modeled on images
gleaned from the Internet. He plans to exhibit 500 of them
together, formulating a different kind of genealogy.
The power of the portrait may turn up in the part—which
stands, of course, for the whole—as in veteran painter
Francesco Clemente’s portrayals of collectors, shown at
New York’s Mary Boone Gallery, where the focal point of
the paintings is the flirtatious, spike-heeled shoes of the
women collectors posed jauntily in the air. The mood is in
the shoe. Emerging artist Victoria Burge also focuses on
legs and feet in drawings and paintings of touchingly
spindly legs in schoolgirl socks, conjuring their owners’
youth and vulnerability.
Political and social critiques play a large role in
portraiture, especially in China in recent years. In the
1990s, when the Cynical Realist and Political Pop painters
made hard-edged, angry, and ironic portraits of Mao,
comrades, and Red Army soldiers, portrait painting was
everywhere. More recently, however, Chinese portraiture
has turned more contemplative and personal.
Yang Shaobin, once a Cynical Realist himself, spent much
of 2006 producing “800 Meters,” a series of paintings
featuring miners from his hometown, covered in dirt, often
smiling despite the hardship of their jobs. The series
underscores the humanity of these often forgotten
workers, whose faces are portrayed as strikingly
individual. The series is part of his Long March Project,
which tracks Chinese history and cultural development.
Yang Shaobin, whose work can be seen at the Long March
Space in Beijing, has written, “In my paintings I aim to
convey a sense of disquiet, that hidden agenda which it is
often hard to put a finger upon, but which is really
responsible for the horrors the modern world is facing.”
The 29-year-old Chinese photographer Cao Fei, who is
represented by the Lombard-Freid gallery in New York,
has made a number of video portraits, including an 88minute film of her father, a sculptor, incorporating footage
of him making a statue of Deng Xiaoping for an official
revolutionary museum. Perhaps her most powerful film
yet is Whose Utopia? (2006), which presents anonymous
factory workers—the individuals behind the “Made in
China” stamp—at a lightbulb factory. Cao Fei divides her
work into three sections. The first is documentary,
showing the workers at their jobs. The second reveals
some of the workers’ fantasy lives—dreams of being a
ballet dancer or a rock star—acted out inside the factory.
In the third part, the individuals look directly at the
camera, and the audience is forced to regard them anew.
Artists Kehinde Wiley and Robert A. Pruitt address African
American identity and social issues. Wiley, who shows at
Deitch Projects in New York, makes immaculate paintings,
inserting black males in street wear into the canon of
Western European portraiture and posing them as saints
or prophets. Pruitt, by contrast, works with symbols: a
beautiful sculptural ring of handcuffs, for example, or his
humble yet dramatic sculpture Glass Slippers (2005),
composed of sneakers covered in shattered beer bottles,
which he showed at the Whitney Biennial last year. His
works can be viewed as portraits of African American
society in general, and of himself, the artist, merging hiphop, found objects, and sophisticated art-making tactics.
In Britain, Hew Locke uses portraiture to question power
structures. He grew up in French Guiana, where he recalls
seeing the image of Queen Elizabeth on his schoolbooks
every day. Her significance seemed very abstract and
unfathomable to him from that distance, and he still finds
it difficult to understand. To put her in perspective, he recreates the Queen’s portrait as it appears on currency but
uses brightly colored, cheap plastic toys, garlands, and
other paraphernalia, as in Black Queen (2004). “My
feelings about the royals are ambivalent,” Locke says. “I
am simply fascinated by the institution and its relationship
to the press and public.” He adds, “My political position is
neither republican nor monarchist. I am interested in
producing powerful, magical images of the royal family.”
Some portraitists conjure images through words or the
combination of words and pictures. Parisian artists M/M,
who are also graphic designers for fashion-world clients,
have been collaborating with writer Stephanie Cohen to
make text portraits of their friends and colleagues—who
include Björk, Kate Moss, Douglas Gordon, Marc Jacobs,
and Nicolas Ghesquiére—as well as collectors who want to
commission them. The collaborators write a text for each
in a style they feel befits the sitter. Since Gordon is a Scot,
his portrait reads as if it were an obituary for a Scottish
lord, while Björk’s is constructed as more of an abstract,
poetic narrative. They then frame the paragraph and, in
the case of the famous friends, display it on a gallery wall.
The portrayals commemorate an individual in a historical,
literary, or social context.
“Portraiture is vital—increasingly so,” says Dan Cameron,
curator of such international biennials as Istanbul in 2003
and Taipei in 2006 and newly appointed director of visual
arts at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans. “We
are losing our identities through the bombardment of
media imagery. Portraiture shows us who we are and how
we feel about who we are: our identities. It’s like a
barometer.”
Pernilla Holmes is a London-based writer and curator.