Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut was always interested in drawing and he had a clear grasp of its potential to help himself think by using drawing as a visual problem solving tool. He used an idea that all stories have shapes as a way of developing story diagrams. There are many kinds of narrative and another one that Vonnegut was interested in was the self-portrait. In the one he made of himself, (above) you can see his awareness of abstraction and how a minimal amount of information is needed to suggest an individual. Most artists that have been interested in representation have at some time or other made a self-portrait. Drawn self portraits are interesting because they can be stripped down, they tend to be more economical and closer to the essence of how an artist saw him or her self.
Paul Klee
Käthe Kollwitz
Max Beckmann
Picasso
Matisse
Gwen John
Bonnard
Franz Kline
Myself in expressionist mode
However these typical 'expressive' portraits are only now found in more conservative institutions such as the National Portrait Gallery or in competitions that still focus on issues of rendering likeness such as the BP Portrait award or TV's Portrait Artist of the Year.
Isobel Peachey: BP travel award winner
The old tradition of portraiture has been questioned extensively within fine art practice and approaches to what it is to make a self portrait are many and varied. A typical approach is one that focuses on what it is to leave a 'trace' of one's existence. This can be a direct physical trace as in some of the work of Jasper Johns or research into how traces of our existence are manifest in the production of other things such as certificates, account details, data collections and numerical accountings.
Jasper Johns: Untitled 1964-65
David Hammons in the late 60s and early 70s created a series of images of himself which are direct impressions left on the world in the same way that other things in this world leave impressions, such as leaves and animals. I was particularly interested in his approach because it seemed to me that this levelled the playing field between people and other things, everything leaves a trace of its existence in some way, and usually that trace is made when one thing makes contact with another.
David Hammons
David Hammons is an interesting artist in that he uses the myths and fables that have accrued around his persona to make points about misconstrued notions of black identity. These body prints for instance, were made by coating himself with grease and then adding black pigment. He is making a statement about his presence in a white dominated art world. Compare his image with the one Johns made, he is much more there as a presence, Johns is emerging out of a welter of 'art marks' embedded within the signs of his practice, but Hammons is still partly having to hold on to some sort of street credibility. His work being also about black history as well as being about his own story.
Thinking of other stories, how do other 'prints' made by geological forces enter into this debate? Can their images be seen as evidence of other non human stories and can these stories be told with as much of a poetic resonance as all the other images made by one thing acting upon another?
Hiroshima
Can these images be seen as types of portraits? Can a flower have a portrait, or a fish? We know that dogs can.
William Wegman
Data can be used to build up your identity and Amazon will have already built up a pretty accurate picture of you by now. A far less sinister approach to data drawing was the analogue data drawing project as developed by Georgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec, whereby they posted postcards of visualised data to each other for over a year, each week looking at different aspects of their lives and converting these things into data as well as associated codes for the data's translation back into 'real world' language.
Georgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec
Lupi and Posavac's work demonstrates how a self portrait can be determined by many different factors and none of them need to be anything to do with how somebody looks. Their work also demonstrates the power of drawing to visualise information abstracted from the world in many different ways.
Laurie Frick
There are many artists using data to develop imagery but perhaps Laurie Frick is a useful artist to look at in that she holds an interesting edge between the use of technology to access data, such as her Fitbit for collecting self-tracking data and the construction of objects and large-scale installations using common often found materials such as cardboard. Frick used her Fitbit and combined it with location data from the online program OpenPaths and her iPhone’s GPS to draw a track that tried to capture the experience of walking through Brooklyn. It is in this area where data meets innovative visualisation processes that I believe fine artists have a powerful role to play.
Frick refers to some of her images made from data collected about herself as self portraits, a clear demonstration that if you don't want to there is no longer any need to be working with those old models of facial recognition, unless of course there is an approach to thinking about image capture that causes us to think again.
The idea that an optically travelling image can leave a trace is fascinating. We have long had image capture stories surrounding death, the last image someone sees being somehow 'burnt' into the eye's retina. Optography is the process of viewing or retrieving an optogram, the technical term for an image existing on the retina of the eye and this process was at one time believed to be a scientific reality. The laboratory investigation surrounding this much miss-understood concept is itself a horror story in its own right. In the late 19th century the physiologist Wilhelm Kühne, inspired by Boll's discovery of rhodopsin or visual purple, a photosensitive pigment present in the rods of the retina, wanted to prove that images on the retina could be fixed, in exactly the same way that a photographic image could be. Therefore Kühne developed an experiment to test out his hypothesis. He fastened the head of a live rabbit into a clamp, so that its head faced a barred window. He then covered the rabbit's head in a black lightproof sack, so that there was time for undisturbed rhodopsin to accumulate in the retina. He then took off the eye cover and allowed the rabbit to 'expose' the rhodopsin by looking at the barred window for three minutes. Then he quickly decapitated the rabbit and sliced its eyeball in half, placing the rear half into an alum solution to fix the now bleached rhodopsin. This resulted in a distinct image of the barred window.
One of the barred window images
Of course he now wanted to perform the same experiment on a human subject, eventually persuading the powers that be to let him have the eyes of a convicted murderer.
Wilhelm Kühne: Drawing made of the image found on Erhard Gustav Reif's retina
The child murderer Erhard Gustav Reif was executed and his eyes given to Kühne who cut the eyes in two and fixed the bleached rhodopsin, making the drawing above from what he found there, which is the only known image of an actual optogram. The story is a powerful one and it continues to be told, especially within science fiction and detective genres. Jules Verne's 1902 novel, The Brothers Kip, contains a reference to optography as a key element of the plot. The Kip brothers are imprisoned for the murder of a ship's captain. When the victim's son examines an enlarged photograph of his late father's head, he discerns in the eyes the faces of the true murderers—two of the captain's shipmates—and the brothers are exonerated. Verne explained the scientific basis of the conclusion in the book's final chapter:
For some time now it has been known—as a result of various interesting ophthamological experiments done by certain ingenious scientists, authoritative observers that they are—that the image of exterior objects imprinted upon the retina of the eye are conserved there indefinitely. The organ of vision contains a particular substance, retinal purple, on which is imprinted in their exact form these images. They have even been perfectly reconstituted when the eye, after death, is removed and soaked in an alum bath.
It is fascinating to see how quickly failed science can become some sort of popularised truth.
I seem to have once again wandered off the plot and have left the self portrait idea well behind, the point I was beginning to make was that by looking at something from an entirely different angle you could refresh an old idea. For instance what if Kühne was the last thing seen by the rabbit? If he was an artist could Kühne then use the resultant retinal image as a self-portrait? This becomes the start of a story and some artists use stories as art.
For many years Mark Manders has been in some way making a self portrait. It is better perhaps to have him explain how he works in his own words.
Mark Manders: Self-portrait as a floor plan
MM: I made this floor plan in 1986 from all the writing tools I had at the time. These served as the basis for a written self-portrait, which was to be formed collectively by seven imaginary persons in a building. It was to be a book without a beginning or an end, one that I would always have to keep working on. I thought it was interesting that it was a dry, formal floor plan, in which no movement whatsoever could be observed. I wanted to project a mental self-portrait into this floor plan, one in which everything would take place only in language. Making a self-portrait seemed to me the most fundamental thing to do. However, while writing it I found I did not like the idea of using written sentences to dictate to the audience exactly what they should think. I did not want the self-portrait to become really personal—it had to remain abstract. I became more and more fascinated by the physical manifestation of the floor plan: how I stood there before it as a human being; how tall I was in relation to the things on the ground; how the changing light transformed a ballpoint pen so dramatically; how I could bring my eye closer to an eraser and what then happened inside my head. This zooming-in created a breathtaking cinematic experience: I could move over these objects, and they dictated my thoughts with their color, language, form, and their indescribable physical coherence. I concluded that making a self-portrait in language was not the right thing to do. The world itself is more complex than the world of language which has been embedded in it. I decided to write the book not with words but with objects, and to embed the self-portrait in reality as an imaginary building.... If you write a self-portrait using objects, it will be read in a totally different way. Viewers—or readers—of the objects construct their own new thoughts, and the result is a self-portrait that is suspended between the maker and the viewers.
This floor plan was never really meant to be an artwork, it was more like a strange kind of writing machine. Now it is a work of art. It is used as an artwork.
This floor plan was never really meant to be an artwork, it was more like a strange kind of writing machine. Now it is a work of art. It is used as an artwork.
Mark Manders
Manders often uses drawings of ground plans to develop ideas for exhibitions, his drawings reflecting an idiosyncratic approach to personal meaning, a sort of private language being developed to talk about his approach to the processing of life's experiences. These 'life experiences' may not be real, but they may be, a self-portrait is an idea and as an idea it can take many forms, some of which might be fictional.
Mark Manders: Several drawings on top of each other: 1990-20015
Many of his works become installations, the one above suggesting a long process of making private drawings that eventually become physical substitutes for the artist's life, which in turn becomes another self-portrait.
De Kooning: Self portrait with imaginary brother
The self portrait can also be a place where you explore other aspects of your life, in De Kooning's case the need for an imaginary brother.
Ivan Albright
In the last year of his life Ivan Albright drew himself as if already a ghost of his former self; on completing the drawing he passed away. When he was seriously ill the Scottish artist John Bellany drew himself as a way to fight through the pain, confront his mortality and try and last a little longer. It must have worked because he lived long enough to make etchings from the drawings he made.
I hope to be more like Bellany than Albright but you never know how you will react to those end times. The one thing I do know is that drawing can be a friend right until the end.
See also:
Further ideas related to concepts of drawings as traces of events or contact with other objects or things.
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