Self-portraiture: on photography’s reflexive surface
(2016)
author(s): Elisavet Kalpaxi
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition deals with narcissism, narrativity, self-portraiture, and photography. It illustrates a practice-based research project instigated in 2007 that aims to decode and recover narcissism as a useful sense-making scenario or system. This approach can help make sense of photography and self-portraiture in the present, and can be employed in the development of visual strategies in photographic self-portraiture.
Here I present the practical work that was produced and the theory that influenced my practice: namely, the revaluation of the relationship between self-portraiture and narcissism, and ideas from the semiotics of photography and narrative theory. The three main sections of the exposition illustrate the chronological development of my work, and each section is divided into two parts.
The first part of each section presents the practical work, whereas the second part illustrates the theoretical aspect of this project, which stems from a wish to reflect on my own art practice and increase my understanding of self-portraiture, while also interrogating narrative codes and devices in photography, such as the double, mise en abyme, and mirroring structures, and their association with narcissism. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, semiotics, and narratology, I argue that narcissism in self-portraiture can simultaneously represent an imaginary withdrawal of the artist, a structure within the work, and a vehicle for narrativity. By eluding structured language systems, narcissism provides a vocabulary for narrativising procedures, as well as meeting the artist’s/viewer’s modes of engagement.
These ideas informed the practical component of the research project and provided the basis for a number of visual strategies employed in the development of the photographic self-portraits that are presented in the second part of each section. In these sections, I also explain the different strategies adopted in producing my images: the role of codes, narrative devices, layering, and reframing for understanding the density of an image and its inherent narcissism. In the process I propose that narcissism should receive a much more central role in the consideration of images and the way they communicate with a contemporary audience.
About exchanging a portrait •
(2016)
author(s): Gert Germeraad
published in: Research Catalogue
This is a text concerning artistic processes. It has a starting point in a project where I am making a portrait of a colleague artist while he is making mine. During the making of this portrait and thereafter I question my ways of working in which I occasionally find myself confronted with artistic blocks. In a period of two and a half years I investigate and articulate my artistic process as it meanders and expends over the different attitudes and problems I encounter in my work. I give a critical analysis of my motives and working methods and try to extend the range of possible ways of working.
This text can be read as an extension of my previous text "Rationality, Intuition and Emotion, exploring an artistic process" that is published in the Journal for Artistic Research, JAR 3.
The Truth in Painting 1993: The World Trade Center Bombers
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Martin Lang
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
1993 was the year of the first Islamist terrorist attack on American soil. The World Trade Center was bombed on the twentieth anniversary of its construction. Most of the bombers were apprehended and now reside in US maximum security prisons (you can check which prison houses who online). Some have since died of natural causes.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is currently in Guantanamo Bay for his role in the 9/11 attack. He was not initially charged with the 1993 attack, but confessed to masterminding it. During his interrogation by the CIA, Mohammed was subjected to waterboarding more than 180 times. He is generally believed to have bankrolled the 1993 bombing, but his nephew, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, is believed to have masterminded it. Yousef was also implicated in the 1993 Benazir Bhutto assassination attempt. Abdul Rahman Yasin is the only convicted WTC bomber to escape justice. The Iraqi authorities informed the Americans of his capture and that he had crucial information regarding the bombing. Inexplicably, the US did not respond, and he was subsequently released (he remains on the FBI most wanted list).
The Twin Towers, representing global trade, were a symbolic target for religious indignation long before 9/11. Could the bombing have been a religious rejection of the New World Order described above?
The Truth in Painting 1993: Runaway Train
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Martin Lang
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
In 1993, Soul Asylum released Runaway Train, which became a global hit. The music video featured real-life missing children taken from the “milk carton kids” campaign. It quoted the statistic that there were over one million youth lost on the streets of America. I always wondered what happened to the missing children in the music video. When a child goes missing, something has happened to them, and it is at least hypothetically possible to find out what (the truth is out there). Originally, I set out to create a piece of investigative art that would shed some light on the whereabouts of these children, but I ended up painting their portraits. Painting is a way of lifting normalised stories of tragedy into the heightened position of portraiture – ordinarily reserved for people in positions of power. These forgotten kids were unceremoniously eulogised on milk cartons because abductions in 1993 were so ordinary that Americans consumed them while eating their cereal.
Soul Asylum made different music videos for the different countries in which they released their single: I concentrated on the missing people from the British version. Tragically, many have been found dead. In one case, a child was located because of the video and returned to his parents: he later blamed the video for returning him to the abusive domestic situation from which he had being trying to escape. Some have been found alive; more are missing presumed dead. Because 1993 was pre-internet (indeed, pre-digital), the amount of information about each missing person available on the web varies greatly. Perhaps the most heart-breaking discovery from this research was that one child’s parents continue to be extremely active – resulting in continuous police activity, local newspaper coverage and even offering a reward for information leading to the whereabouts of their daughter's body – while another missing person has no information about him at all on the web or in local newspaper archives.
This is a text concerning artistic processes. It has a starting point in a project where I am making a portrait of a colleague artist while he is making mine. During the making of this portrait and thereafter I question my ways of working in which I occasionally find myself confronted with artistic blocks. In a period of two and a half years I investigate and articulate my artistic process as it meanders and expends over the different attitudes and problems I encounter in my work. I give a critical analysis of my motives and working methods and try to extend the range of possible ways of working. This text can be read as an extension of my previous text "Rationality, Intuition and Emotion, exploring an artistic process" that is published in the Journal for Artistic Research, JAR 3.open exposition comments (0)