On Portraiture

When I started my MFA back in May of last year, I said, “After a lifetime of writing and working in news, I am leaving all of that behind. Now I’m an artist.” What I didn’t understand is that instead of jettisoning the skills (and passions) I had honed over 63 years of a life, those things would be coming to school with me (along with the handmade Diane Arbus lunchbox). Because they are part of me. Work and life are seamless. 

Writing is as natural to me as breathing oxygen. I write to figure out what it is I’m feeling, what it is I need. 

So, what does that have to do with portraiture? In my case, mucho. 

I recently blogged about my reaction to the Felix Gonzales-Torres show at the David Zwirner Gallery (NYC). What I didn’t write about was the WOWSAH moment I experienced when I encountered FG-T’s word portraits. 

Consider this. The work below is entitled “Untitled (Portrait of the Magoons)”.  It is a portrait of a real life couple, the Magoons. Each gallery contains a different “version”. The presentation of three versions of the work highlights its ability to exist in more than one place at a time, as well as underscoring the fact that at the core of the portrait works is Gonzalez-Torres’s intention that each manifestation be an opportunity for a new version.

The words are used to capture the most significant moments, people, places in this couple’s life. FG-T worked collaboratively with the Magoons, just as a portraitist does with sittings. There is no contextualization in the form of wall text. No asterisks to explain who Julie is and what happened in 2021 that made Grace so important. There is no photography involved; no painting or sculpture, either. The work comprises short textual entries and dates that are presented directly on the wall in horizontal registers at “frieze” height. 

Gonzales-Torres died of AIDS in 1996 at the age of thirty-eight.  So then how is it possible that the Magoons’ portrait includes events that post-date the artist’s death? The answer is astounding — and revelatory — to me. Gonzales-Torres always intended for his portraits to be updated. Each manifestation is to be seen as an opportunity for a new version, in which content may be added, removed, changed or rearranged. The work is perpetually mutable. 

Who we are stays the same over time and changes over time simultaneously. Some facts were important 10 years ago and no longer feel important; some facts remain important all the way through a lifetime. This is what the artist was intending. 

This kind of portraiture allows us to exist in different spaces and in different times. 

That opened a new door for me in terms of the work I’m doing right now. I am looking at portraiture. I want to include memory, myths, legends, the unreliability of stories passed from generation to generation. I want to invoke the mutability of our histories as reflected in portraits. 

The photograph I used at the top of this post is one made with mercury glass. I reflected an old photograph into mercury glass vase and then photographed what I saw: the original photograph and a reflection of that photograph in the mercury glass. What excites me about this process (using a mercury vase I bought for twelve dollars on Amazon) is that it presents the same person as both present and past. Or maybe present and future? Or maybe past and future, even. One of my mentors said, “You’re totally fucking with time here.” 

BAM.

That’s the kind of portraiture I am interested in. It’s intriguing to me. How do I capture a full portrait of someone, even myself, with my past and my histories, bringing in as Felix Gonzales-Torres did, what matters to the subject in that moment, and yet still leave room for changes and mutations?