Subject
It is a mark of contemporary life that personal identities have
become fractured, complex, and splintered, and that they are in a
state of constant re-definition. Similarly, contemporary art
has also become more heterogeneous and discrete as "major themes"
in art are less evident. As a result, two of the most basic questions,
"Who are we?" and "What is art?" share the
same concern: they both struggle with the challenges of subjectivity. Subject is
an exhibition of fifty-five portraits done by thirty-four artists
which demonstrates how a diverse group of artists have each negotiated
the intersection of these two questions.
The
portrait is art's attempt to account for identity, to make
sense of what it means to be an individual. It is art's way
of grappling with being a subject, with subjectivity itself,
and in a sense is as old as art itself. Both art and individual
identity emerge at the same historical moment: the simple outlined
handprint on a cave wall. These earliest human gestures are where
art history textbooks begin. The same handprints are also evidence
of the first notions of "I," the first self-conscious
mark, signaling the moment of recognition of one's own being.
The first work of art is also the first graphic evidence of identity:
it is, precisely, a self-portrait. While the origins of portraiture
might be quite simple, even Romantic, contemporary identity, contemporary
art, and therefore contemporary portraiture are decidedly complex.
Some
of these artists such as Jim Torok or Thomas Chimes, approach the
portrait quite directly, though relatively few of the works in Subject are
traditional portraits in a formal or stylistic sense. On the other
hand, several works would not appear to be portraits at all. Stanley
Brouwn's piece, for example, is precisely a 'measure'
of its subject in the most elemental way, literally the measure
of the subject's height transferred to an equivalent length
of aluminum rod. Though at first glance this work's cold
matter-of-factness would seem anything but poetic, Brouwn's Portrait is
nevertheless a poignant expression of modernity's reduction
of the individual, an example of modernity's assault on the
subject. Others, like Gregory Gillespie's enigmatic Painter
in the Bedroom, or Joe Coleman's symphonic portrait
of Carlo Gesulado, examine the destabilizing and corrosive effect
of guilt. Hiroshi Sugimoto's monumental Yasser Arafat examines
the disintegration of 'authentic' personal, political
and historical identities, proposing that identity and the
portrait are both simply different instances of artifice. In
yet another way, Glenn Ligon's Malcolm X (version 1)
#1, traces the tectonics of how identity is formed by the
shifting and colliding of individual, political, and social ideas
about race.
Nationalisms,
the loosening of gender constructions, and reconsiderations of
race, are just several obvious examples of the limitless number
of pressures currently being brought to bear on the most essential
of questions: "Who are you?" At the same time, art
itself continues to redefine, reassert, and reconfigure ideas of
representation and expression, and so while many participants in
the contemporary art world would like to dismiss it, we are (despite
the embarrassment it causes some of us) grappling with variations
of the resilient question, "What is art?"
It
is these two channels of urgent, fundamental questions, "Who
are you?" and "What is art?" that come together
in the portrait. All portraits are negotiations between identity
and representation, between being a subject and portraying a
subject.
Likewise,
all of the works in Subject are similarly engaged in negotiating
between what or who the subject is, and how to best represent the
complexity and the contingency of identity. Clearly, these fifty-five
negotiations are as varied and complex as the identities they are
attempting to represent.
Steven Holmes |
