These are my broad interest areas, however, as can be seen, the area of focus is still to be teased out from this tangled, interconnected web of ideas.

 

 

1. INTRODUCTION

What is a portrait?

A historical overview of portraiture from Renaissance to present day as well as
more contemporary critiques of portrait theory; what is being portrayed; how it
is being portrayed; why it is being portrayed.

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My definition so far?

A portrait is a map of an identity; a map with hierarchies:

A continuous cycle of viewpoints filtered through our own perceptions...

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2. SPACE / THE 3rd SPACE

Within what medium/space does the sound/light portrait exist?

How the 3rd Space - the space in between, the void, the depleted space - can ceate meaning. (Note to self: I suspect this is more than one chapter!)

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a. The 3rd space offers the viewer / listener, the 'inside' of a moment; the void or depleted place where the obtuse meaning can be found; the place where the audience can create their own space past imposed narrative and meaning. Barthes, Hollander, Kramer and others offer insight into this place.

 

b. The historical portrait existed in many mediums – sculptured stone and other materials; oil and acrylic paints on canvas, board, wall and other mediums; charcoal, pencil, watercolour on paper; other liquids that can make marks such as blood, ochre; photograph on film.

 

c. Sound portraiture inhabits a completely different 'space' - a space with little solid tangibility; a space created by the displacement of air by tone, timbre, rhythm and dynamics.

 

Discuss the history of the medium of portraits. How does the recent digital medium affect portraits. What new elements and abilities are brought to bear by the medium, such as sound, time, movement. What new spaces are opened up when the artist is able to create in the digital realm.

 

d. Equally important - in what space is the completed portrait viewed? Traditionally, the portrait was shown in a palace, a grand house or place of worship. Now, portraits are shown in either an art museum, gallery or domestic portraits in a home. Within what space would digital sound and image portraits inhabit? How does this alter the traditional function and form of a portrait?

 

1. Survey of digital visual portraits – do I include documentaries and if yes, what will be the criteria for including some and not others.

2. Survey of digital sound portraits

 

3. TIME

The use of film and music/sound brings the element of time to the portrait. This is a canvas that both the image and sound uses.

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Many have explored this idea;

Film/image: Eisenstein  first developed the ideas behind editing or 'montage' to essentially alter absolute clock time, to re-define time to convey the meaning, the tone that the artist wishes.

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Music/sound: Jonathan Kramer talks of the different time contexts in which music sits, and how music can redefine time from the absolute clock time of linear music to the 'vertical time' of 'moment music'. It is through the manipulation of time that music can express meaning.

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Particularly interesting is both their uses of the term "vertical time" or stasis.

For Kramer in reference to music, much non-linear, non tonal twentieth century composers (Stockhausen, Morton Feldman etc) create music that is made of discontinuous moments a "single present stretched out into an enormous duration, a potentially infinite 'now'" (p55, 1988) This creates a time within which every moment is packed with meaning and is not dependent on what went on before or after that moment.

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For Eisenstein, 'vertical montage' is an important element in his thinking. 'Vertical montage' relates both to the idea that film is a succession of 'stills' much like Kramer's continuous 'moments', as well as the ability of editing or montage, to be able to alter time radically; to make it stop, slow, speed up, run backwards, flash back or forward, overlay.

The still is a quotation, the inside of a fragment, packed with information. The still is read instantaneously and vertically and therefore rejects linear absolute time.

When the stills are edited with music and sound the  information becomes even more dense by means of the editing - fugal or contrapuntal. Through montage or editing, the series of stills can subvert clock time completely and force the viewer see the mass of information / meaning held vertically.

As Barthes says the film created and read in this way "throws off the constraint of filmic time ... and requires a reading that is instantaneous and vertical ... it creates indescribable meaning" (p68 1977)

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To my thinking, these ideas relate to the Renaissance painting where the artist has attempted to convey the character, education, status, personality, wealth of their subject in a moment of time by placing within the canvas as much information as is possible - either as actual objects, the expressions and clothes, metaphors carrying meaning and import. Holbien's The Ambassadors is a perfect example of such a painting - one that expresses much about the subjects in a single moment of 'vertical time'

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Cubist painting, with its depiction of all sides of a sitter or object, even the inside, is another fine example of 'vertical time' in paintings.

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4. LIGHT

Light within space is the 'canvas' for film portraits, as it is in many traditional portraits.

 

From the chiascura lighting of some Renaissance portrait painters, the Northern school in particular, to images in digital film created entirely by the interplay of light, light is one of the central conveyers of meaning and animator of feeling in portraits. A play of light suggests meaning rather than imposes it. Anne Hollander, Roland Barthes speak of light as being effective in delivering the added meaning, the third meaning, the air, the tone.

 

5. AIR / BREATH 

Air within space is the canvas for sound portraits.

 

Is this true?? I'm yet to explore this idea.
 

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6. CONTENT

What is the content of a portrait?

 

How has what the artist chooses to place in a portrait changed over time? What items, if any, are placed in the portrait and to what end; how and why is the face represented; what clothes is the subject dressed in; what relationships, if any, are shown. How has this changed in a digital portrait? We have more tools to use such as words, sounds and change that can be shown over time. With modern psychological understanding, we have a changing and more in depth understanding of what constitutes a ‘self’ – this too, must become part of the content of a portrait.

 

 

7. NEGOTIATION / INTERPRETATION

What is negotiated between the subject, the artist and the audience?

How is the subject interpreted by itself, the audience and the artist?

 

An historical understanding of the business of art and portrait painting in particular, would be revealing. How has this changed in the digital age? What is the deeper contract that is negotiated between subject and artist and how is this affected by the exchange of money. How does this affect the way an artist interprets a subject? How is this altered when there is no ‘patron’ but rather simply an artist wishing to bring his own vision on the face of a subject. How does celebrity affect the negotiation and the interpretation of a subject?

 

How, with post modern theory, do we view the audience/viewer?

How does the subject see themselves and interpret it to the srtist and audience?

What cultural restrictions does the artist bring to bear on his interpretation of the subject?

How does the audience inyterpret this soup of relationships?

 

(Look at Foucault, Barthes, Derrida)