Imaging identity media, memory and portraiture in the digital age review

Melinda Hinkson ed., Imaging Identity : Media, Memory and Portraiture in the Digital Age ANU Press, 2016 Neil Maizels is a Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist, digital artist and composer ba

Melinda Hinkson (ed.), Imaging Identity :

Media, Memory and Portraiture in the Digital Age (ANU Press, 2016)

Neil Maizels is a Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist, digital artist and composer based in

Melbourne, Australia

This timely and generous book grew from contributions to an international symposium in 2010

to mark the re-opening, in the digital age, of the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, and, rather seam- fully, it blends the variegated viewpoints and philosophies of academics, artists and the anthropologist-editor of the collection, Melinda Hinkson

The contributors are Didier Maleuvre, on Rembrandt; Hinkson herself on the ethical and

technical issues of painting in the digital world; Gali Weiss on ‘diasporic looking’; and John Conomos, Michele Barker, Anna Munster and Jennifer Deger on the newer media of video, TV and the ‘mutable face’ in science and technologies of identification All are brimming with ideas Hinkson is quite provocative—or maybe just democratic, or historical—by beginning the book with Maleuvre’s championing, and privileging, of Rembrandt’s ‘good ol’ fashioned’ sweating time and crushed paint pigment with the painter’s subject, even when the subject is oneself, as with Rembrandt’s late ‘selfies’ But she no doubt knows that this rather constricted definition of

‘proper creativity’ will be blown out of the canvas by the authors and credos that follow in the later chapters Indeed, those chapters give full harmonic resonance and artistic validity to still and moving digital pictures and paintings reshaped from photos, video, TV and all sorts of hybrid and spontaneous alchemic admixtures of form

But Maleuvre says, for example:

‘Truly the camera has cheapened the human face, taking the labour (of love) out of it What took months for Rembrandt to reckon with, the lens shutter dispatches in a trice’

In my view (and I think Hinkson’s), this is misguided, on so many levels Leaving aside

Tarkovski fuming at the argument because of the many months he spent setting up just one of his film moments, the lens artist may have invested just as much creatively sculpted time and psychological work, even if (often) this is done internally, among one’s inner relations and inspirations and

unconscious reflections, through a deeper perception than the resulting visual or social production makes obvious There is no such thing as ‘getting lucky’ in photography, as Maleuvre insists—

everything is chosen or discarded, and surely the full array of our conscious and unconscious selves

is intimately, if mysteriously, involved The photographer can feel for the right moment, the right light, the right twitch at the edge of a mouth, in accord with his or her inner sea, even if Maleuvre wants to see this as a lesser form of fishing Turner could intuit the right feel with a rapid swirl of sneezy snot from his sleeve Sure, he tied himself to masts to spend time inside a tempest, but bringing his inner tempest to the canvas and through to the viewer was his purpose So, surely, regardless of the digitality or whatever -ality that will

come into play on our techno-palette of the future, it is the feeling that is brought to bear that will endure and reach through to the viewer The human sincerity- meter is very finely calibrated This becomes apparent in the wonderfully limpid chapters by Barker and Munster and Deger, taking us right through into their portraiture snowstorms—their living rooms of artistic thinking The Conomos chapter is less successful, but perhaps because the fluidity of working with video

is not so easy to capture in linear language

Ultimately, a portrait touches us It reaches and reveals the looker—and this collection shows us just what an emotional and un-passive experience this can be, for both creator (midwife) and receiver (ponderering, bemused parent) The great thing about this book is that one finds oneself thinking just as much about the viewpoints and ideas that seem to not quite hit the mark as about those one agrees with

Hinkson says that:

I move from the abstract space of public debate to some more intimate positions from which to gauge the interactions between persons and images, shifting register to

consider how technological mediation figures in the work of three Canberra-based

artists, who describe themselves as painters

This is developed fully when we reach Deger’s chapter, the culmination of the book’s

questioning of the relationship between portraiture and identity, which started,shakily with Maleuvre’s early chapter on Rembrandt’s intimate relationship not only with his individual subject but with the commissioning community

Deger takes us into her world, where art re-presents and focuses on the foundation stones of identity, where the interrelationship of family, community and society are all to be read in the face and surrounds of the portrait—so unlike much of the (flat and context-less) album-cover

portraits of Western pop music (Bowie’s iconic Aladdin Sane album cover, for example—but not the Beatles’ Abbey Road, with the street crossing and surrounding cars and suburb

embedding the figures of the portrait.)

So Deger can easily, and meaningfully, say of the portrait’s subject that:

set against the elongated diamonds and colours of his tie hangs a miniature sword, its placement foregrounding not only a Dhalwangu identity but a foundational source of power, force and ferocity… Bangana’s father was named after that knife…his name is on that knife—Lawarrwarkk; it also means stingray

This description recalls the analyst Donald Winnicott’s statement that there is no such thing as a baby; that it only has meaning in the context of a present (or absent) mother But it also contrasts beautifully with Gali Weiss’ description of her work, and the bounds of its subject, in her

chapter, ‘Diasporic Looking’:

I was experimenting with notions of identity in representation, questioning what actually

constitutes identity in the image My exploration seemed to clearly indicate that I was not satisfied with depicting a fixed image of a person All my depictions displayed shifts of

movement in form and gesture, continuous material layering, at times to the point of erasure The look of my subject was either uncannily familiar or particular yet anonymous

…The materials I use in my portraits and in methods of application enact a mobile and ambivalent state of being that is a feature of diasporic consciousness

If this touches on the poetic, then it is soon followed by something literally earthier, and yet also touching the mystical:

In MotherDaughter (as self portrait) each image is made of my mother’s photographed face as

an enlarged photocopy transfer together with the observational drawing of parts of my face layered over parts of her face The areas of watercolour wash surrounding the face have been

sandpapered in some places in an attempt to excavate an underlying physical presence

Almost as a kind of bridge, Hinkson has placed Conomos’ chapter on the self-portrait and the film and video essay between the above two chapters, as if the flow of chapters is itself depicting the flow of the image from still to animated and then to ‘archaeological’

The chosen works (generously reproduced throughout the book) draw us in—beckoning us,

pulling us, coaxing us to merge our projected identity in order to speculatively and passionately explore the drawn (extracted) identity in the merger with its ‘drawer’ From that vertex the actual medium matters little What counts is the passion and sincerity and courage of the artist in

wanting to explore through a simultaneous merging with, and yet abstraction from, the ‘subject’ The artist must bring us from their imaging to our imagining (the less successful don’t get us across this Stygian bourn), but there are many ways to do this, and some of those ways only succeed for a small proportion of viewers It must be a collaborative process, and one that may sometimes only happen decades or even centuries after the work’s creation The move from seeing an image as kitsch (‘isn’t that cute!’) to experiencing it as moving one to inner sight (‘O h,

my God’) is a highly complex, sometimes fickle, ever-evolving process, involving civilisation, cultural taste and fashion, and the potential of each individual to make something of everything that is presented to their eyes, and soul

Interestingly, our Australian national portrait competition (now almost a sport), the Archibald Prize, has developed a well-publicised split between the ‘authentic judging’ and the supposedly lowbrow (non- intellectual and non-paying) Packing Room choice Hopefully, Hinkson might one day attempt to make more explicit the recalescent thrill of the blue-collar result before the

studied nod or shake of the head when hearing the ‘proper’ result

As the force of the book builds, what strikes the reader is that every artist must find their own authentic ‘means of production’: there is no one true way, as Maleuvre had suggested in chapter one And, the book itself is a composite image—each chapter (portrait) coalesces into a uniquely questioning stance and raison d’être for each artist, like being taken into each one’s inner

courtyard It is not so much the correctness of each approach that counts but the sincerity, in faithfulness to the credo of each artist Maleuvre’s limitation of this pluralistic society of creative souls is not necessarily wrong; it is just a poor ‘reproduction’ of the pluralistic truth that the rest

of the book opens out to, and celebrates Turner is not more correct than Picasso, but they are both bound, in freedom and in chains, to their own internal vision and aesthetic, beyond all isms Hinkson’s collection lives and breathes this conviction, re-presenting the human face, itself a representation of our inner selves as we move through our lives and joys and pains In so doing,

it changes how we view viewing, and it stands as an important monument to, but also extension

of, the work of John Berger in the 1980s It deserves to be read not only by those interested in portraiture but by anyone interested in thinking about emotional meaning and its apprehension in the image of a face, in an age where we are flooded by selfies, and drowning in smart-phones