PORTRAITURE; A SOCIAL POLITICAL ACT
A Precursor...“Morality, yeah morality is played out in different narratives. When there’s no ‘doubt’ there’s no catalyst to unravel, like, why do I like this subject? I ‘value’ caring, understanding difference, authenticity, visibility, opened minds, eyes. it depends on systems of value. But all systems (words, images meanings) act together to shape accepted common sense. So the platform to represent is where the power lies, to control, to shift. It’s important to learn from consequences, a tendency for compassion has added more to evolution than actions for insular gain.... So we are always part of systems that create different aesthetics. To see from others’ eyes can expand your reason, grace u/w gratitude, perspective, drive. Exposure to difference, w/accountability leads to progress, which will ultimately satisfy the ego in a broader sense I think. There is a choice in this. This can be mediated through sharing, communication, creativity, and collaboration. I like that u note your purpose as being therapeutic, it’s always been the case with my practice, that and pleasure. Self-awareness is 💡🔑 to shifting narratives and not being a dick. I 💭 Relational research marks a shift in human culture, a more global digital idea of personhood….in general though, some people get off on communicating with others and others just want to stay in their box. We all enjoy a story one way or another, and that creates empathy and development. Again there’s no right and wrong way, it’s a result of the ingredients and conversation. Caring is different to empathy, empathy is caring about someone who is not the same as u, it feels good to share emotion. If u have expectations from empathy then it just isn’t. It’s the act of empathy we enjoy, not the outcome as social animals so yeah for self-preservation.” (Extract of a personal conversation via social media surrounding empathy, morality and creative practice).
The themes in the essay emerge from an anthropological and reflexive endeavour. I will assess the relationship between creative practice, politics and empathy as a way in which to reframe the context of Art specifically portraiture, questioning its political and social value, addressing my own motives and interest in art and cooperation. I intend to offer a version of Activist Art through the vessel of portraiture and, as an instinctive practice of empathy. This essay acts as an argument for transdisciplinary practice and plastic visual arts in a contemporary global climate. I am writing from the perspective of two dualistic but interconnected locations, first as a painter and second through the lens of social science and philosophy. I aim to explore the roots of my personal notion of empathy in my practice through offering a version of portraiture that considers a holistic history including multiple ontologies and perspectives. I am distinguishing the practice as vital human behaviour that through sensory, unconscious expression of the human condition, creates traces of complex relationships and narrative between self, other, medium, object and environment, supporting Ranciere’s theory on the interdependence of politics, aesthetics and identity.
This essay is influenced by my personal journey from portraiture to anthropology, driven by a desire to socially activate my work outside of the Art World. I want my work to embody both artistic aesthetic accomplishment and have social impact, supporting Tanke’s overview of Ranciere, claiming “art need not be politicized, for indeed its practices are already political inasmuch as they alter the distribution of bodies and voices within a given society” (Tanke, Artandresearch.org.uk, 2019). First I will outline the metaphysical foundations of my process, followed by a contextualisation of portraiture, focusing on the painted portrait; and finally an exploration of empathy, creative practice and aesthetics. To illustrate these ideas I will draw from portrait artist Alice Neel, Neel’s work and life demonstrates how dominant identity ideologies can be challenged and undermined through a visual experience; through a human act of perception and empathy. Indeed, drawing on Ranciere’s ‘Partage Du Sensible’, deconstructing the “tension between a specific act of perception and its implicit reliance on pre-constituted objects deemed worthy of perception” (Museum of Education, 2012).
Metaphysics - Development through Transformation
> Empathy > Transformation > Aesthetics > Enchantment > Disruption > Action >
“Ideas flow from one to the next in a cyclical fashion. A change in one affects the others, which in turn affects new change in the original. All parts of the circle are equal; no part can claim superiority over, or even exist without, the rest of the circle”(Wilson, 2008, p60). Two theories that have informed the metaphysical foundation of my thoughts are concepts of energy outlined in ‘The Accursed Share’ by Georges Bataille, and concepts of relationality outlined by Indigenous scholar Shawn Wilson in his book ‘Research as Ceremony’. Wilson offers a new approach to research methodology in the social sciences, based on indigenous ontologies, he states “We could not be without being in relationship with everything that surrounds us and is within us. Our reality, our ontology is the relationships” (Wilson, 2006, p76): he redefines the term ‘indigenous’, as a knowledge system that is inclusive to all. Indigenous ontology acknowledges dependence and value of all positional ties within a community, which is integral to this framework. Bataille describes the economy, capital and social growth in relationship to transformation and movement of energy, rooted in a fundamental understanding of solar energy and movement of energy on the globe claiming that society always produces more than is necessary for its survival; it has a surplus at its disposal and that it is precisely the use of this surplus that determines it (Bataille, 1991). This ‘surplus’ could be framed as what we conceive as the ‘unconscious’, ‘gifts’ or enchantment’. In Lewis Hyde’s The Gift of the Creative Spirit he describes ways humans have explained this energy, “some take their gifts such as “deity, genius or muse” that provides the artist with the initial substance of his art (Hyde, 2006, p149). Energy when transformed into the art object, has the potential to impact our and individual and collective aesthetics, which in turn impact our environment, social values and political consciousness (Siebers, 2019).
The concept of constant transformation of surplus energy is fundamental to my understanding of why viewing and creating portraits draws on and produces empathy. I am not subscribing to any single political viewpoint instead intend to reflect, engage and reform, through theories of transformation and relationality. Distinguishing portraiture from the constraints of commerce and understanding its social-political capabilities. In Richard Brilliants theorisation of portraiture he write’s “Portraits exist at the interface between art and social life, the pressure to conform to social norms enters into their composition because both the subject and artist are enmeshed into the value system of their society”(Brilliant, 2013, p11). Portraits cannot be separated from their relations. Historically this is reflected in the formality of western portraits found in our national galleries, which reflect the constraints of one's governed society. However, I will not dwell on Eurocentric realist and romantic movements of the 19th century which value objectivity and idealization. Instead, I am drawing on alternative ontologies and disruptions of popular narrative, to notice how, the variety of the practice of painted portraiture contributes to and represents, notions of individualism, nationhood and cooperation. My focus on the role of unconscious transformation, from energy into the material is informed by my own practice; a visceral, physical practice of looking, feeling and painting that enacts a direct and immediate exchange of energy between artist, subject and object. Thus, literally building and representing identity and relationships simultaneously. This method of documentation transcends observational language, and reveals the multiplicity of both the artist and the sitter, through, the unconscious act of painting. In this sense, portraiture can be contextualised as an abstraction of the self: 1. The inner and outer individual self. 2. A collective web of individual perspectives. Therefore, can be understood as a fluid system that is constantly in flux, and a site to re-contextualise or re-represent versions of self, otherness and embodiment. Thus, locating it within relations built between creative practice, politics and activism.
Historical Contex
> Faces > Spaces > Trace’s > I will follow a trajectory of portraiture through time and culture, to look forward, and explore the possibilities of the plastic portrait the contemporary globalised landscape and identity. Conventionally, the portrait offers legacy, honour, legitimation, bonding and gift giving, appreciation and notability to subjects and artist. My portraits do not fit into the commercial art world: each portrait acts as a meta-narrative relative to the subject, relations, and the time and place of its creation and there is an inconsistent aesthetic to each painting (Fig.1,2,3). I am interested in how the process of making a portrait parallels that of forming an identity, and is an expression of both the artist and the sitter, this method, creates insightful thick descriptions, that allow for an intimate connection between artist and subject. This reflexive, active collaboration produces new relations and disrupts normative western versions of self and ‘other’. Reportedly, the first recorded western portrait was found in Cave Angoulême in France (Jones, 2006),(Fig 4), It is imagined to be a drawing of a face onto stone, manifesting as a combination of lines and shapes that replicate the human form. I am using this example, as it demonstrates the first manifestation of the notion of the individual, a separation of ourselves from ‘nature’, through an abstracted, dualistic reflection of ourselves. Bauman muses ‘Identity, needs to be created, as works of art are created” (Hinkson, 2016), signalling the first trace of our conscious individuality.
Aboriginal portraits, however, offer an alternative perspective. In Jane Raffan’s article ‘The 'I' in Indigenous Art’, she uses Aboriginal Art to challenge how we look at and think about art (Raffan, 2019). Providing alternative ways to recognise and conceptualize portraiture, she explains that portraits in Aboriginal Australia don’t ‘follow the convention of depicting a face or even a physical likeness, instead reveal a person’s identity in relation to others, to the land and to the creator ancestors” (Raffan, 2019), presupposing, that the portrait can be recognised as an abstraction and vice versa. This depicts an ontological state, which disrupts western value systems and identities through cultural variations. Providing an example of how visceral depictions of self can reorder the sensible and affect the production of identity, both contribute to the evolution of our idea of our conscious being. Definitions of portraiture are distinguished and representational of our cultural epistemologies. For example, non-figurative works in Aboriginal art should not be discounted as abstract, in the sense of being non-representational. Linguistic boundaries define art ‘movements’, however, are in constant flux in. English Painter Francis Bacon used the phrase ‘walking the tightrope between the figurative and abstract’ to describe how his work represents the inner and outer self (Bacon and Sylvester, 2019). I am including Bacon as a example of the fine line between portraiture and abstraction, and because in his paintings contain, simultaneously aesthetic enjoyment, empathy and pain, depicting a simultaneously grotesque and beautiful portrait (Fig.4), demonstrating the contradictory positive and negative revelations of empathy. Anthropologically the portrait offers authentic, personal, cultural and political information that can be drawn from the analysis of the aesthetic, communicating feeling that is beyond linguistic observation. Psychologists and Sociologists Jessica Hoffman and Sara Lawrence Lightfoot explored portraiture as an ethnographic tool, and research methodology in their book the Science and Art of Portraiture. They explain how “Portraiture is a method of qualitative research that blurs the boundaries of aestheticism and empiricism in an effort to capture the complexities, dynamics and subtlety of human experience and organisational life.” (Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis,1997). I hope to have demonstrated the heterogeneous nature of portraiture manifesting from a relational empathetic process, that can result in collective, historical introspection.
A Socio-Political Zeitgeist > Personal > Political > Perspective >To visualise my ideas and uncover more of the political and active power of the portrait, I will draw on the work and life of painter Alice Neel (Fig. 5), whilst leaning on Imaging Identity: Media, Memory and Portraiture, as a means to theorise this process in a contemporary setting. Imaging Identity is a collection of interdisciplinary essays compiled for a symposium held at the Australian National Portrait Gallery. Their collective commitment is to “understand relations between persons, as an elemental component of what is to be human, using portraiture as a way to explore and create larger social relations and wider cultural context in governmental practices that shape relationships between persons and pictures” (Hinkson, 2016, p3). For example, we can understand the aesthetics of personhood, collective wellbeing, political movements through a historical analysis the different presentations of portraiture, for example depictions of angst in post-war artists such as Egon Schiele (Fig.6), large dominating formal portraits of the monarchs, or fragmentation in post-human representations (You Tube, 2014).
Portrait artist Alice Neel provides an example of an artist that unintentionally decentred hierarchical representation of others. She was the first celebrated portrait Artists to represent multiculturalism; she painted a diverse range of people, including marginalised groups, LGBT individuals, politicians, intellectuals and strangers (Fig.7,8, Fig Her paintings honour marginalised people, whom because of their nationality; sexual orientation political affiliations had been devalued by society (Meyer 2014, p184), creating value, through legacy. Neel was a radical communist, who had a troublesome life living through,poor mental health and poverty, throughout her painting was a constant. I am focusing on Gerald Meyer’s review of Phoebe Hoban’s Biography of Neel (Hoban, 2013), titled ‘Alice Neel: American Communist Artist’. Meyer explores Neel’s political and personal world in relation to her diverse choice of subjects and stylistic approach claiming that it was a matter of critical importance to her subject. Meyer praises Neel’s diversity and process; He writes “Especially commendable is her discovery of the backgrounds of the many people who populated Neel’s life, a necessary element in accurately situating Neel within the elaborate web of her relationships”(Meyer, 2014, p180). Aesthetically and stylistically, Neel’s work sits between realism and expressionism; her work is emotionally revealing and sensitive. Her uniqueness is located in her depiction of diverse subjects, without projecting sympathy or hierarchal values onto her marginalised subjects, suggested by Meyer as an unconscious result of her communist politics (Meyer 2014, p184). Her extensive body of work produced visibility and created shared aesthetic spaces between unlikely associates: creating an arguably humanist representation of 20th century America. This alignment is where her active ‘empathy’ with her subjects is transformed through the act of painting into objects and then to the viewers. Her portraits’ presence in galleries, publications and the art world, shifted perspectives of diversity and marginalised communities. Thus, her work acted as a disruption of the sensible, a shift that played out over time, as the legacy of her work and subjects was appreciated through the accolade of her paintings.
Neel’s work demonstrates, visualises and objectifies a common complex interrelationship between personal experience, artefacts, and political life, creating an authentic and revealing depiction and perspective of the human condition. Meyer writes ‘Neel’s work demands the attention of Women’s History, American Communist History as well as Art Historians’ (Meyer, 2014, 179), positioning her as social-political force and activist artist. Like Bacon, her portraiture conceals and reveals different versions of being human, drawing from the unconscious and producing new objects of aesthetic beauty. Her political message may be explained by her “straight up unadulterated communism” (Meyer, 2014, p180). However, her practice and body of work caused a hangover of social effect, contributing to the post-colonial narrative. Her work provides an example of the interdependent relationship that exists between the political, aesthetics and activism. Meyer’s critique of Neel as a Communist Artist highlights the relevance of personal history to process, prior to the act of empathy, which determines the potential of disruption through creative practice. For me, like Neel, portraiture enacts a type of empathy that I have with my chosen subjects, a powerful characteristic of portrait painting that historically has been capitalized on by dominant social groups, political and religious ideologies, and corporations to establish hierarchical systems of value, idolatry and aesthetics of nationhood. This can be seen in institutions such as national portrait galleries where versions of national and collective identities and ideologies are produced (Hinkson, 2016).
Development and Progression
> Empathy > Aesthetics > Activism > In this section, I will explore and theorise the role of empathy in activating and politicising artworks, specifically portraiture. The Aesthetics of empathy, of human self-recognition and participation, most prominently represented by Theodor Lipps (Worringer, 1908), is fundamental to my contextualization of the practice of portraiture, as a ‘active’ response to re-represent urged by instinct, sculpted by biography and environment, thus relational. The aesthetic expression of this mediates the relationship between individualism, visibility, cooperation, with the enchantment of aesthetics and the art object (Coote and Shelton, 2005). “Aesthetic enjoyment is objectified self-enjoyment. To enjoy aesthetically means to enjoy myself in a sensuous object diverse from myself, to empathise myself into it. 'What I empathise into it is quite generally life. And life is energy, inner working, striving and accomplishing. In a word, life is activity”(Worringer, 1908, p5). I am drawing from William Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy, as it connects ideas of empathy, form and will, in aesthetics and art-making, demonstrating the plastic arts capability to communicate the sensation and the unconscious. I am, however, rejecting the opposition he posits between representation and abstraction. Instead, I focusing on their relationship to one another, implying that the ratio of these components is situational and relative.
I believe that part of the aesthetic and social value of portraiture is caused by unconditional biological empathy with our own form and fragile bodies. This fragility of the human form is exposed in abstracted and expressionist versions of portraiture, for example, post-war 20th Century Artists such Neel and Egon Schiele, Bacon, Alex Katz and Lucian Freud, all of whom were included in the ‘Walking the Tightrope’ show at the White Cube curated by Barry Schwabsky. The show situates portraiture in an alternative context, bridging the gap between figurative realism and abstraction. The ‘will to abstraction’ as described by Worringer, is a response to a world that is regarded as a source of uncertainty and anxiety. I am contextualising the portrait as an act of apperception, mutually abstract and naturalistic, political and aesthetic. It is an ongoing process and behaviour, which expresses a sense of ourselves: constructing reality by imprinting our memory and image into the environment. Functioning socially as both a coping mechanism for the uncertainty, whilst simultaneously driving our political conscious and social-political identities. Worringer discusses this sense of uncertainty and “helplessness” as a historical cultural constant. I would argue that from this uncertainty, however, we produce and indulge in pleasure, beauty, and relationships that construct future narratives: all born from an ‘urge’ to feel connected that is acknowledged through indigenous ontologies and the process of transformation and connection are intrinsic to notions of cooperation and activism. The precursor to this essay is an attempt to articulate my moral motives for making portraits of people who are not ‘seen’ in society, a question that followed the act of representation, rather than the other way round. Worringer’s theory of empathy justifies that the portrait can act as a manifestation of morality, questionably present as a form of activist art. This re-appropriation and rearrangement of medium and of narrative can be seen in contemporary artists such as Kehinde Wiley (Fig.5), who creates portraits of African-Americans in the style of classical European paintings (Ujiyediin, 2019).
How does this connect to activism? In a symposium on Aesthetic Activism The Aesthetic Today, Ranciere describes Activism as ‘Action’ and suggests that political intent can come from the process of its creation, as seen in Neel’s and Kehinde’s work (Ranciere, Foster Cage, Youtube, 2016). I am defining portraiture as both a process and an act of representation, perception, and communication, which produce relationships and culture, embedding perspectives into an object through time and labour. In this sense, the portrait can be understood as a site of activism. So, what is the value of the medium and materiality of the painted portrait socially and politically? The painted portrait is an object and artefact, which through our interaction with it, enacts honour and produces societal value and so supports the idea that the aesthetically valued object holds a principle of true and good, a means of distributing moral values (Coote and Shelton, 2005, p41). The creation of a painted portrait demand’s an investment in a relationship and an investment of time and movement. Value can be created through the transformation of a person’s time and energy, through the unconscious exchange between subject, artist and medium. Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man published in 1964, he proposes that the "content of any medium is always another medium” (McLuhan and Gordon, 2015). In this context, empathy is the content of portraiture and, portraiture is the content of identity, and our identity is shaped by our relationships and the medium of portrait painting, characterised by its objective materiality and transparent physical qualities. The transformation of a person’s time and energy produces social and politic value, making it a perfect medium to communicate versions of idolatry, propaganda and capitalism. When considering this in activism, we must question who is included and who has access to this process? A rearrangement of what, who is visible through objects empathised into life, can enact a transformation of societal perception of value and can be reconfigured in the political conscious.
Conclusion
Empathy as an Intrinsic Human behaviour > Process as Site of Transformation > The Painting as the Art Object > Aesthetics as a Mode of Communication and Production of Identity and Value > Through this essay, I hope to have communicated that by valuing all parts of a working system, supporting Wilsons relational ontological theory, and sharing perceptions, there is potential to reconfigure hegemonic systems and dominant norms that impose a hierarchy of new and old identities. Celebrating diversity through portraiture can enlarge our vision of human variation, challenging colonial perceptions of difference as a deficiency, that dominated western culture. This is supported by the historic and metaphorical link between the creation of identity and process of painting. These elements plus the collaborative nature of the process makes portraiture a perfect medium for mediating messages motivated by morality. Visibility and enchantment of artworks contribute to the development of societal and individual narratives and can act as contribution to human rights movements that are linked to aesthetics such as disability, gender and race narratives. This formula, however, is dependent on the biography of the painter, the space and location of the distribution. All of the elements must align to create politically effective portraiture.
The political value is situated in the relationship and encounter between the artist and the subject, a site of empathy, all of which is transferred into an object through the action of painting. Alice Neel’s work provides an example of where concepts of aesthetics, empathy and the political enter the same space. Using Worringer’s theory of empathy to communicate the function of this meeting as a response to uncertainty and anxiety and an urge for connection, an intrinsic function of activism. In Anthropology and the opacity of Other Minds, Robbins and Rumsey report that in most societies you can find people ruminating on how difficult it is to see into the hearts and minds of others (Robbins and Rumsey, 2008). For me, this articulates one of the global functions of art, communicating different perceptions of reality through aesthetic manifestation to soothe anxiety. Indigenous versions of portraiture highlight a reliance on dependency, reminding us that our identities and bodies are in a constant state change and flux. Painted portraits produce a trace of this, a tangible encapsulation, and in print of moments of connection and versions of self. Collectively, portraiture documents versions of how we position ourselves in the world, for example, symbolic versions of portraiture in indigenous culture, in comparison to the enlarged, separated and curated versions of the self that we see in western art history. Each version of the portrait reflects both the individual and political zeitgeist producing new aesthetics, objects and social relations.
The act of Portraiture making is both natural instinct and a historically conditioned practice, capable of altering what can be seen, heard, and valued, supporting Ranciere’s theory. It is not necessary that socially engaged, politically effective art is labelled as Activist or Political, I offer that presupposed motive, may deduct from the aesthetic and political potential of the art object. When the cause of change and action is motivated by the personal, political with an existing vocation for artistic practice, the artwork combines cultural and monetary value with political and social currency. For me activism, empathy and globalisation are relational, and a determined part of the human condition and evolution. Enacting social engagement, material value of intimate relations between human bodies, material objects. Historically and culturally, it immobilises the multiple ways that we interact which we can analyse through noticing the conditions of the medium. By rearranging ecological elements there is the potential of change perspectives and norms, supporting Ranacier’s distribution of the sensible and concluding simply, that self-representation and art are a form of communication that encourages introspection and cooperation.
“Aesthetics can be understood as the system of prior forms determining what presents itself to sense experience. It is delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and invisible that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience Politics revolve around what is seen and what can be said about it, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time” (Ranciere 2006:13).