Portrayal and the search for identity PDF
Preview Portrayal and the search for identity
PORTR AYAL AND THE SEARCH FOR IDENTITY marcia pointon portrayal PORTR AYAL AND THE SEARCH FOR IDENTITY marcia pointon reaktion books Published by Reaktion Books Ltd 33Great Sutton Street London ec1v 0dx, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk Copyright © Marcia Pointon, 2013 This book has been published with the support of The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. Printed and bound in China British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Pointon, Marcia R. Portrayal and the search for identity. 1. Portraits. 2. Identity (Psychology) in art. I. Title II. Portrayal 704.9’42-dc23 isbn: 978 1 78023 041 2 Contents Introduction 7 1 Portrait, Fact and Fiction 23 2 Slavery and the Possibilities of Portraiture 47 3 Adolescence, Sexuality and Colour in Portraiture: Sir Thomas Lawrence 75 4 Accessories in Portraits: Stockings, Buttons and the Construction of Masculinity in the Eighteenth Century 121 5 The Skull in the Studio 181 References 233 SelectBibliography 258 Acknowledgements 263 Photo Acknowledgements 265 Index 267 1Marysa Dowling for the National Portrait Gallery, Teenage Mother and her Child, 2008. Introduction We are surrounded by portraits. Empty your pockets, or your purse, and forms of pictorial identity spill out, from the cipher- like profile of a ruler on a coin, postage stamp or bank note to security passes and library cards, from photographs of family and friends to the depiction of an author on the back of a paperback novel. On billboards and tvscreens, in newspapers and on computer monitors, imagery of human beings, and especially of their faces, abounds. The largest category of images accessible by Google Image are portraits of people, while common- place terms like ‘in your face’, signifying someone or something that crosses an unseen and unspoken boundary and confronts you, and names like ‘Facebook’, testify to the pre-eminence in our systems of communication of representations of real people who have lived, or do live, as individuals and as collectives. Above all it is the face that is understood to define portraiture, and our ability to use advanced technologies to register faces has huge import for the societies we live in: the Jarrow hunger marchers, who walked from Tyneside in the north of England to London in 1936to protest against unemployment and poverty, were anonymous. The fact that they were defined as a mass, a ‘crusade’, rather than as individual protestors, lent their cause weight and conviction. In 2010students protesting in London and other ukcities against the British government’s plans to change radically the system of funding universities were individ- ually identified by barrages of cameras and by police helicopters with advanced photographic capabilities. Following riots in London and other English cities in August 2011, the police mounted huge screens in city centres on which were projected 7 Portrayal and the Search for Identity cctvimages of those presumed to have participated in looting and arson. The ‘public’ was invited to identify them. This capacity for instant mass facial representation fundamentally changes the relationship between the individual and the State: protestors can be picked off individually and their cause, it can then be argued, is not unified but disparate and characterized by individuals rather than a common grievance and a collective will. Facial recognition is understandably central to portraiture; after all, the fact that (almost) everyone is born with the same constituent parts of the face – nose, eyes, mouth – and yet no two people look exactly alike is a conundrum at the heart of what it is to be human. Reconstructive facial surgery may be cosmetic, archaeological or forensic but its importance for people who have been born with facial features so variant from the norm as to make life difficult for them, or those who have suffered accidents, indicates how vastly more hangs on a face than the ability to breathe through your nose or eat and speak with your mouth. Theologically ‘man’ is believed to have been made in God’s image, and though the face is not especially privileged in early Christian teaching the idea that the eyes are windows to the soul was firmly entrenched by the Renaissance. One might have anticipated, given that dnais now thedefining mechanism for individual identity, that the face might have begun to diminish in cultural value but quite the contrary is the case. And it seems that our need to engage visually through facial encounters, whether with ourselves or with others, remains central in all societies. Yet the face and its replication in works of art is contingent historically and perceptually. In an important piece of research on legal debates about likeness and copyright in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France, Katie Scott has drawn attention to a case in which it was argued that accuracy in portraiture could not be considered a breach of copyright unless the accessories were of sufficient importance that they formed the composition, thus dividing ‘into separate domains, the face and the accessories or framing context’ and setting ‘the latter above the former as a site of genius’.1Outside of a legal context, acts of portrayalare bound up with anxieties about betrayal – about inauthentic representations and about imagery that appears difficult to 8
The list of books you might like
