Category Archives: portrait

Portraitist Elizabeth Peyton is no Warhol (and not as fun as C.L.U.E. either)

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The New Museum of Contemporary Art of Bowery is hosting Live Forever, works by portraitist Elizabeth Peyton, and so I took my excited little butt there last night, after a long day of work. (Not coincidentally, the New Museum is free on Thursdays from 7 to 10 p.m.)

I had only seen Peyton’s images online, but thought they used color well and that it was exciting to see something as traditional as figurative portraiture make a splash on the contemporary art scene. Peyton paints friends and also cultural icons in her remarkably cohesive oeuvre. As it was her paintings of Kurt Cobain, lead singer of grunge band Nirvana who committed suicide in the 90s, that brought Peyton into the limelight, I thought I would be encountering something Warhol-esque, where the confluence of the individual and pop culture become huge statements about our cultural identity.
My expectations were confounded. Peyton perhaps gives us an intimate glance into her interior world, but I wouldn’t even go so far as to say she’s making a statement about herself. And yet, she manages to say nothing about the people she portrays at the same time. Remarkable.

Peyton’s works are small and intimate, consequently seeming overwhelmed by the whiteness of the New Museum’s gallery space, and painterly in a broad way. Miniatures are often exquisitely detailed, but these approximately 10″ x 12″ works were broadly sketched out like watercolors. They were unlike traditional portraiture in that, instead of taking the subject in a formal pose, these were composed like Polaroids as if the subjects were caught unawares at extreme angles. They were well-painted and pleasant. Unfortunately, I can’t say much more in their favor.

While Peyton is a figurative portraitist, she does have a distinctive style that colonizes her subjects as her own. All her subjects become triangular faces with bright red mouths and slanty eyes, and she seems to prefer fey males. The works are stylized enough to be distinctly hers, and are more revealing of her than the subject. Perhaps that itself is the difference between her work and traditional portraiture.

Seeing her oeuvre at once, I had the idea of that this was her interior world in which the works were snapshots of memory.Peyton’s style does not seem to have evolved–any of the portraits could have been painted at any point in her career. Overall, it was a little…boring.

However, I insist you stop the New Museum anyhow, for a very small and very fun installation. Wedged into the interior staircase between the third and fourth floors, an installation called “C.L.U.E.” will entertain you better than clowns and acrobats at the big top. According to its press release, “C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience) is a collaboration between artists A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds (Layla Childs and Sonya Robbins), AJ Blandford, and Kinski. Like a living organism, C.L.U.E. adapts to the space it temporarily occupies. In this manifestation at the New Museum, it takes the form of site-specific performance, multichannel video installation, and video projection.”

What does that mean? It means that, once you put on the headphones, you can’t help but bob your head in time as the matching pair of girls do funny dances across parking lots, deserts and redwood forests, all via projector through the window onto the building across the way. A blast.

Paul McCarntey and Nicolas Sarkozy star in Art Gone Asunder

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Two fabulous headlines for your Wednesday morning: Paul McCartney left his head on a train and Sarkozy is ‘needled’ by voodoo doll.

Ahhhh…Wednesday morning news…
Paul McCartney’s Head?
Yes, it’s true. McCartney’s head has been lost, rather, the ape-like wax representation of it. Professional transporter/grand bobby Joby Carter was taking it to an auction in Berkshire, England, where it was estimated to fetch up to 10,000 pounds. Then Carter, similar to Mrs. Prism in The Importance of Being Earnest, left the baby, ahem, the head. The BBC reports: “The head was left in a bag under a seat on a train from London at Maidenhead station in Berkshire on Thursday. The service would have terminated at Reading.”
I suspect McCartney paid him so that nobody would ever connect him with that terrible head again. And speaking of unwanted likenesses, Sarkozy’s in a bit of a stitch across the channel. Oh the power of the public image! Oh life as art! Oh unwanted portraiture! Oh the horror!
Nicolas Sarkozy is not amused.
As one can tell from the image of the French President, left, Sarkozy is not amused to have been transformed into a voodoo doll. BBC reports that “Sarkozy has threatened to sue a publishing company if it does not withdraw from shops a ‘voodoo doll’ in his image.” It even comes with pins! According to BBC, “The publisher said Mr Sarkozy’s reaction was ‘totally disproportionate’ and has so far refused to pull the doll from shops.” Vive la revolution!
Ah, life and art don’t really change, do they? As I wrote in an earlier post, a voodoo doll bears a remarkable similarity to a medieval portrait, and here we see the voodoo doll as portrait. In the Medieval ages after a regime change, the new rulers would scratch out the eyes in portraits of previous rulers.
So what conclusions can be drawn from this morning’s news? If you are a public figure, people will do terrible things to your likeness, in which case you must either steal or sue the maker. Then after passing your hands three times over the false image, you must suck the tiny bit of your soul that is trapped in it out. (I recommend the breath they teach in Lamaze class.) Then you must burn the false, soul-sucking idol. Add its charred remains to the images you create of your enemies for a little extra oomph.

Tidbit: how similar is a voodoo doll and a medieval portrait?

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I’ve been reading about the history of the portrait lately. The section before the Renaissance, medieval Europe, seemed like a blip to get through. Really, one, if one were less aesthetically inclined, might use the word, dare I say it, boring?

Not really the case. Portraits functioned as more than just commemorating an occasion, such as marriage, or representing a person visually. It was not important that portraits resembled their subject at the court where people were idealized or to entice one into marrying a woman or to honor the noblest qualities of a ruler.

As it happens, the portraits depicting their subjects naturally were destroyed. These people were criminals who had escaped justice. Portraits had fetishistic properties, and could be used as a substitute for a person. So a criminal who could not be caught was depicted, and then his punishment was given to the portrait, limb by limb as the case may be. Referred to as “excutio in effigie,” the portraits could even be burned publicly.

Hoardings of portraits have been found of persons with their eyes scratched out. Often when a regime changed, the new rulers would gather images of the former governors and scratch their eyes out. Images–often unflattering ones designed to provoke scorn–were placed in public view as well. All these have the ultimate aim of destroying the subject’s authority through defiling the image of them.

So one function of the portrait is punishment? It’s crazy to think that in the Middle Ages, when ruled by God in Christian lands, people gave such power to the graven image. Reliquaries were worshipped as holding real bits or traces of holy people. But did they believe the images of the saints and devils in the churches had the same power? What would happen if someone scratched the Virgin Mary’s eyes out? Maybe the world still gives the same talismanic properties to images they deem holy.

There you have it: why a voodoo doll is like a medieval portrait. Up next, why a raven is like a writing desk, and other important questions.