Election Day
I'm scared to look.
Paint on Canvas
In an article in the weekend Financial Times, Jackie Wullschlager writes about a show of Renaissance portraits at the National Gallery in London. She makes a series of broad statements about the contemporary implications inherent in the changes portraiture went through at that time. Jackie says, for example, “the more human individuality is threatened — by biogenetics, global capitalism, the identikit personae of YouTube — the more intensely we turn to painted portraits.”
I remember hearing something similar in a YouTube video, “An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube,” by anthropologist Michael Wesch and his class at Kansas State University. That piece is exactly what it says it is, and, of course, it itself is also a YouTube phenomenon that looks at other YouTube phenomena and back at itself. Anyway, one of the points he and his class make is that as certain values get eroded by phenomena or technology they simultaneously become more valued. They mentioned authenticity as being a value that is highly prized among YouTube denizens, as it is relatively easy to fake a posting. And therefore, the whole YouTube world prizes stuff that isn’t slick, or God forbid fake, but is “real.” When anything can be virtual, then “real” becomes precious.
So, I can see what Jackie is getting at — that the humanistic values implied by the new (at the time) Renaissance portrait styles might have contemporary relevance. Jackie also says that previous to the Renaissance, full frontal portraiture (not full frontal nude body images) were reserved for pictures of Jesus. So, by implication, to paint real people in that way was to say that the individual is no less than the God(s). That we each have a spark, a dollop, of Godness in us, and it’s always a little different. Maybe this was the beginning of the rise of the cult of individuality, of the idea that each of us is completely unique. Each a nation unto itself. Now science is telling us that maybe we’re not as unique as we would like to think. We’ll see where that leads.
Of course, portraiture was originally reserved for the rich and powerful — royalty, popes, bishops and powerful merchants. But eventually, the less wealthy merchant classes soon adopted it. Jackie quotes an Italian satirist, Pietro Aretino (1554), who laments that “even tailors and vintners are given life by painters.” God forbid. So, the rich and powerful did what they always do; they changed the rules of the game to maintain their distinction. They could afford to, so they had their new portraits done giant size. Or what was then giant size. It goes without saying that only they had the wall space for such large-scale works.
When is a painting not a painting? When it is a hot line to God. In another article in that paper, Robin Blake reviews a show of Byzantine works that includes a number of icons. These paintings were, he says, not revered for their painterly qualities and certainly not for their humanistic values. They were closer to sacred relics according to Blake. Like the bloody nails, bones, and wood fragments elaborately displayed in many churches today. “Any pious person who tried hard enough, it was thought, could establish a hotline to the divine through the painting.” Not only were these paintings powerful agents in this way, but also their power could be multiplied and transferred. (Walter Benjamin, take note). A copy, maybe every copy, maybe even bad copies, of the original icon was believed to somehow partake of the power of the original. This is digital technology from 1000 years ago! Where the copy and the original are identical — at least identical where it matters. I remember going into some Orthodox churches in Greece while there on tour and seeing women kissing the images on the icons. Not tongue kissing, mind you, but there was definitely passion of another sort involved. I wondered to myself how many contemporary artists might wish their work could elicit such a powerful reaction. Needless to say, one doesn’t judge these “artworks” in the same way one judges other portraits, just as a splinter allegedly from the cross is no mere chunk of kindling. Art criticism in this case becomes useless, and aesthetics too — it all becomes irrelevant.
