This letter on portraits and portraiture to/for Ines Lechleitner and Stéphane Querrec was prompted by the addressees. I made some comments on seeing the works they showed during the Jan van Eyck Opening Week and each had asked me separately if I could perhaps write down the gist of what I had said. I chose to write a letter to both, because I did not want take up the position of an art critic. The letter addressed to both together isn't an attempt to ‘kill two birds with one stone’, but rather a provisional space in which to keep thinking. A sequel to this letter was printed in a publication by Ines.

Dear Ines and Stéphane

It might seem strange to write to you jointly, but there is an overlap and maybe some future communication in it. During the Opening Week you both showed videos which impressed me in a certain way, differently of course. I would not claim too strongly that there is common factor other than me, the viewer. I tried to express how I appreciated your videos when we talked, and coincidentally, you both asked if I could write it down.

Sometimes what seems to make sense when you say it does not survive when you try to write it, so maybe you won’t recognise what I write, or will remember what I said differently.

What was behind my remarks was how I perceive your works as portraiture. I can’t say I ever fully conceptualised portraiture, although I spent more than ten years working on it — portraits, that is, drawings to be precise.

What I perceive in your works is what I would call anti-social portraiture. That would be easy to define in contrast with social portraiture, which is an established — if underrated — genre of painting. I am completely seduced by portrait paintings by van Dyck, Ingres or Sargent for example, but I could not possibly achieve anything like this. Not because I lack the skill of painting (which I do lack), but for social reasons. The social portrait, of course, does not need to be a great painting. Group photos, wedding pictures, snapshots and miniatures (intimate portraits) are also social portraits. I should emphasise, social portraits are not portraits of society. The social portrait is supposed to provide an acceptable likeness of an individual, with the emphasis on being acceptable rather than being like, or indeed, individual. It is nicely described in Wilde’s tale The Picture of Dorian Gray, where by chance the qualities of the portrait stick the the man instead of the panting.

A likeness of an individual. That is, the social portrait provides the semblance of individuality. A portrait painting is always more like other paintings than it is like a person. Painting a portrait (or however you choose to make it) is another matter. It means being involved in a relationship, or rather, a set of relationships, even as one tries to subtract oneself from it. The set of relations can be highly socialised and heavily conventionalised. What else could make it seem so spontaneous and convincing?

The set of relationships also has the potential to be complicated, conflicted and perverse. Here is where I perceive the anti-social portrait. Now, I don’t want to try to reduce this to an equation of (supposed) constants and variables, but I would like to recall how your works impressed me and how the conversation went.

When I mentioned complication, conflict and perversity just now, I did not mean that these qualities should be ascribed to an individual, thus qualifying him/her and his/her portrait as anti-social. There are many social portraits of individuals whose complications, conflicts or perversities would tend to qualify them as anti-social beings and hence justify their exclusion by the arbiters of society. When individuality is subtracted from such portraits they become genre pictures, typically depicting proletarians, prostitutes, actors and so on. A favourite genre of social portrait is the self-portrait of the artist in which the artist claims (historically) his social prestige by flaunting his anti-social character, often by adopting various genre disguises, among these nakedness. The modernist, or psychological portrait adapted these traits to the flattery of bourgeois citizens, affirming their identity even as their appearance was deformed.

Stéphane, how can you call those videos portraits? Unless by that you mean a deliberate attack on identity. To be sure, the videos have in common with what are commonly identified as portraits the framing of a subject, face, head and shoulders, the look, out of the frame, towards the viewer, in this case the camera, you. But these aren’t pictures, they are videos! You lure someone to your studio, you frame their picture and then you make them speak. This is not portraiture, this is ventriloquism! You’ve written everything down and you make them recite. You rehearse and you direct. You make them learn their lines. You make them lip-synch their own voices. Take after take. You write in the first person, for them, against them. Therefore they have no choice except to speak in the first person. You write nothing of you, or of them, only of I. I that they must speak, but of which they know nothing, of which you know nothing except what you write. In what you call a portrait, the visible person is a ventriloquist’s dummy who must eat your words and swallow her own voice, make her lips move convincingly for us. That is, convince us to identify the dummy with the I in its mouth; convince us she is a willing impersonator, therefore like us; that I is the speaker and not you, the writer. Like you lured her to your studio (as dummy onto your lap), you lure us into contradiction and conflict. He’s just not the same anymore. Truth or dare? I dare you to eat me out.

So I am not afraid of the disjointed identifications, detached genitals, scattered thoughts. Here is no split personality, nothing strange or uncanny. It sounds like a kidnapping. It sounds like a hostage-taking. It sounds like a normal childhood.

Ines, it’s been a long time writing, that is to say, not writing. I have to say, I like thinking it over and there is a slight reluctance to give it up, but my debt is beginning to nag. Apart from that there’s no urgency. I don’t need to persuade you of anything. Or to convince or convert anyone on this matter.

The notion of a portrait emerged in the jungle of Sumatra in a way which could hardly be predicted, a way which, for me, highlighted two aspects of portraiture which aren’t constrained by its social norms (One is tempted to call it wild). But first, how did it get there?

You were telling someone about when you were making the final preparations for the book Pièce de cinema, selecting images. You wanted to go through it with Isabelle, the young woman who is the subject (and the object) of this piece, which is also a portrait of her. You asked her for her approval of your selection, if she was OK with it, or had she any comments or suggestions. After all, it is her image which is at stake in your work. She told you that she wanted you treat her (her images) just like you treated the gorilla. Quite a strange thing to say, it seemed to you, since she knew the gorilla was never asked about his images. It seemed to me she thought your question was absurd. It seemed to me also that her reaction was an expression of trust, not so strange, but an unusual trust. Not the kind of trust that you put in someone who is supposed to know best, in a doctor, for example. The patient is never disinterested and the trust is, from the patient’s point of view, in any case groundless. (How should the patient know if her doctor was really learned or competent?) Isabelle’s interest in her images is not like a patient’s interest in her health. I don’t think she meant to say: You are normal, you are the artist, you be the judge. (We would have to ask her.) I imagine a more intimate, less coercive kind of trust. I suppose — I speculate — she perceived in your relationship with the gorilla and in your images of him, that you did not attempt to anthropomorphise him. You did not try make him resemble a man.

I think that’s true, or at least fair. I’ll come back to the gorilla, to the zoo and to the jungle in a moment. First, a complication you introduced at the beginning of my acquaintance with your work. Maybe Isabelle is familiar with this too. You showed a portrait of your father, a photograph. I saw a man with his shirt off sitting in his garden. You explained that you had always failed to make the portrait of your father that you felt was just (Or was it another criterion?) until you asked him, and he agreed, to pose as a gorilla. Perhaps it was the gorilla you had already got to know and whose portrait you had made? You said that for several years you visited a family of gorillas in the Munich zoo. You hinted you formed a relationship with them. You went to look, like everyone who goes to the zoo, only you went to look often, repeatedly. Did you buy a season ticket? You are a visitor, nonetheless, an observer, but not exactly a zoologist. The gorillas at the Munich zoo live behind a thick pane of glass, which you point out, isolates the sound. You look, often, through the glass panel, you point your camera through the glass. You do not try to disturb the animals. You notice the humans on their side of the glass — your side — the young ones especially, behaving strangely, like monkeys, to get the attention of the gorillas who are apparently impassive, or preoccupied with their own concerns. You affect preoccupation with your concerns: photography and video, meanwhile, you are looking, as if to make the isolating glass panel transparent. You manage that transparency, not in spite, but only because of the sound-insulating window and the rest of your glass.

So what did you do with your father? A question I thought I had no idea about (nor any interest in — to be sure, I don’t know any more about your family than I do about the gorilla family), but now it seems to me clear. You muted him. After he agreed, he couldn’t speak and you couldn’t hear him. To pose as a (the) gorilla, means to remain behind an isolating pane of glass. In this case the camera provided all the glass which was needed for him to be indifferent (to you) as long as the pose was in effect. Clearly, he wouldn’t have agreed unless you had the camera. The camera would be no use unless he agreed. You made him — while imitating another creature — only resemble a man.

In the jungle there is no glass panel and you are all ears. Besides, the portable glass makes no difference when all you can see is camouflage. Against the foliage, your silhouette appears, listening. You make your guide imitate the calls of the gibbons you could not see. He also interprets them. You talk about ‘experiments’. Although, still, you are not a zoologist, nor an anthropologist. What then? You play back recordings you made in the jungle to a gibbon barely visible in the trees. He looks but does not answer the call. You seek out an orangutan in the jungle to get a look. Your guide says his vocalisations signify annoyance. You say you can’t read it. You play back the sound of the orangutan in Sumatra to orangutans captive in the Berlin zoo. Silently the animal appears to investigate the source of the sound. You play back similar sounds, camouflaged incongruously by prompters’ boxes in a park in Düsseldorf. In the video you imitate the passer-by.

*

Are we still in the realm of portraiture? Or, to put the same question differently, is not a portrait an ‘experiment’ too? If yes — I think so — then that suggests that when it is not the means of producing a (social) portrait, and in fact often even when it is, portraiture is above all an instrument of looking (and/or of listening). An instrument of looking is the possession of a voyeur/se. The voyeur/se manoeuvres him/herself into the observation position openly or covertly — sometimes hiding in full view, behind glass, behind a camera. The point is to occupy this position for a time — a long time, if possible. For the voyeur/se, a glimpse, a shutter-click, is not enough — and neither is a long exposure. The point is to occupy the position despite the duration. From this position one may observe, but not possess the object. Indifference to possessing the object observed, sometimes mistaken for objectivity, or attributed to the technical equipment of observing which is the real object of possession, keeps the object in view. The voyeur/se is at once transfixed — the aim, I said, is to hold something in view, with a look, an instrument of looking — and already bored because, in even an instant’s glance held like this, time dilates indefinitely. Hence the experiments. They could take all the time in the world. You could also call them pass-times, games. Games such as an art work or an interpellation: a call out to an object already isolated, an appeal, a prompt, an address ‘to camera’ as they say in TV studios, to the unsuspecting observers of the art work.

A portrait makes appointments. It makes a rendezvous with the subject’s object. It makes a call to bring it into view. A portrait is the apparatus of the observer’s position, hence it stakes out the position of the other. In so far as it is also a stake-out, that is to say, a vigil, time will be mainly occupied by disappointment.

(This, incidentally, is why a death-mask is not a portrait.)

(This is why a self-portrait is a contradiction in terms and brings only vanity and/or beating yourself up. The thing about a portrait is you can’t do it by yourself.)

Regards,

Anthony

‘Letter on Portraiture: Inhabiting the Duration of a Look’ in Ines Lechleitner, Puzzle Box (Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Academie, 2010) ...
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