Dualism and the Critical Languages of Portraiture Evripidis Altintzoglou
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Dualism and the Critical Languages of Portraiture Evripidis Altintzoglou MA, BA (HONS) A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Wolverhampton for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy September 2010 This work or any part thereof has not previously been presented in any form to the University or to any other body whether for the purposes of assessment, publication or for any other purpose (unless otherwise indicated). Save for any express acknowledgements, references and/or bibliographies cited in the work, I confirm that the intellectual content of the work is the result of my own efforts and of no other person. The right of Evripidis Altintzoglou to be identified as author of the work is asserted in accordance with ss.77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. At this date copyright is owned by the author. Signature ………………………………………….. Date ………………………………………………… 1 Abstract This thesis analyzes the philosophical origins of dualism in Western culture in the Classical period in order to examine dualist modes of representation in the history of Western portraiture. Dualism – or the separation of soul and body – takes the form in portraiture of the representation of the head or head and shoulders at the expense of the body, and since its emergence in Classical Greece, has been the major influence on portraiture. In this respect the modern portrait’s commonplace attention to the face rests on the dualist notion that the soul, and therefore the individuality of the subject, rests in the head. Art historical literature on portraiture, however, fails to address the pictorial, cultural and theoretical complications arising from various forms of dualism and their different artistic methodologies, such as that of the physiognomy (the definition of personality through facial characteristics) in the 19th century. That is, there is a failure to identify the complexities of dualism’s relationship to the traditional honorific aspects of the portrait (the fact that historians are inclined to accept at face value the fact that portraits historically have tended to honour the achievements and social status of the sitter). Indeed, scholars have a propensity to romanticise the humanist individualism inherent to this long history of the honorific, particularly in canonic portrait practices such as Rembrandt’s and Picasso’s. My thesis challenges this conventional history, by drawing on a study of Platonic and Cartesian dualist thinking, as well as on a series of anti-dualist positions (proposed by Derek Parfit, Gilbert Ryle, W. Teed Rockwell). Hence the thesis has three key components: firstly the analysis of production of the honorific in portraiture from classical culture to Rembrandt in relation to the changing determinates of dualism, then a discussion of the crisis of the honorific and the increasingly conflicted nature of dualism in modernism (Picasso and Braque), and then finally the break down of dualism, or its radical modification, in art of the 1960s. In this section - drawing on recent advances in the theory of the mind and neuroscience – the thesis focuses on the way various artists (such as Mary Kelly and Art & Language) have questioned dualist portraiture and its humanist emphasis on the honorific and the face/self. 2 Contents 1. Introduction 4 2. Narcissus’ Legacy The Origins of the Western Portrait & the Emergence of Dualism 21 3. Rembrandt’s Dilemma The Introduction of Cartesianism in 17th Century Dutch Portraiture 59 4. Picasso’s Solution The Crisis of the Honorific & the Clash of Subjectivities 117 5. The Turning of a Blind (Third) Eye The Critique of the Honorific in Radical Forms of Contemporary Portraiture 181 6. Epilogue Vicious Circles 228 Bibliography 247 3 Introduction There are a number of factors that must be considered in analysing a portrait in order to establish its meaning: the intentions of the artist, the social identity of the artist and the person represented, the conventions of the portrait and the genre the work falls into. We are then in a position to ask: has the artist created a reasonable likeness, or an idealisation or counterfeit image of the subject? Has the artist incorporated a hidden symbolism, or biographical references - such as the subject's profession or social class, or for instance, their allegiance to a cause, principle or ideology? Knowing these things we can then surmise what the likely function of the portrait is, its relationship to other works of a similar kind, and the relationship between the artist and the person represented. My research on the place and function of the portrait in pre-modernist, modernist, and post-modernist art will apply these kind of analyses to a range of works, paying specific attention to the demise of the traditional 'monadic' and painted academic portrait and the rise of the multiple and allegorical installation-based portrait. In doing so it will attempt to map the development of portraiture in relation to the philosophical position of dualism, and its subsequent modifications and rejection. 4 The traditional, academic portrait has clearly been subject to various forms of denaturalisation over the last 100 years, but it is only with the incorporation of photography, and text, into 1960s avant-garde art, and as such its rejection of the 'expressive' model of representation generally, that the claims of the traditional portrait to reflect or mirror the identity of the sitter have been questioned in any explicit fashion, producing a widespread critique of the Cartesian Self. These transformations have brought into being new forms of portraiture and new kinds of working relationship between the artist and the person depicted, and new accounts of the representation of subjectivity in art. In this respect, an understanding of the history of the dualist portrait format is absolutely crucial in understanding the extensive turn to the representation of subjectivity in contemporary practice. Indeed, once portraiture is freed from conventional dualist modes of representation in the Conceptual art of 1960s, portraiture dissolves itself into a discursive politics of the self. The first chapter of the thesis offers a historical overview of the origins and development of the Western portrait, beginning with the Egyptian and Greek portrait and stretching to the Renaissance. In doing so, it focuses initially on a selection of Greek and Christian myths of the origins of the portrait, in an effort to underpin the role and function of the portrait in these cultures. The emergence of the Western portrait is presented through an analysis of the key notions of the ‘honorific’ and ‘exemplary’ in classical portraiture, which derive from Platonic and Aristotelian positions on art. In this respect, the Hellenistic and Roman employment of portraiture as forms of self-promotion is reviewed in relation to the Aristotelian notion of idealisation. Similarly the abstraction of the figure in Byzantine art is examined in relation to the Platonic origins of the Christian prioritisation of the spiritual. These two fundamental positions form the basis for the subsequent analysis of religious, state, and humanist portraiture during the Renaissance. In addition, the first chapter traces the philosophical origins of Cartesian dualism in classicism, and presents an overview of anti-dualist positions, spanning from classicism to the present day. The central Cartesian notion of an eternal and immutable soul is located in Platonic philosophy, while it is discussed in relation to the Aristotelian (materialist) position of ‘hylemorphism’. Furthermore, this chapter 5 traces the gradual assimilation of Aristotelian philosophy – particularly the unresolved question of the intellect – into the realm of Christian Dogma, which led, through the work of Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo, to Descartes’ formation of the cogito argument. Once this framework is in place, Cartesian dualism is reviewed in relation to Locke’s proto-empiricism, Hobbes and Spinoza’s materialism, and Hume’s early reductionist view of the self. This section of the chapter ends by focusing on various materialist accounts, such as Gilbert Ryle’s ‘behaviourism’, Derek Parfit’s version of ‘reductionism’, Daniel Dennett’s ‘functionalism’, and Charles Taylor’s notion of the self as a socially and culturally bounded agent. In the last part of this chapter I develop an account of the dualist portrait. In general, the dualist portrait is characterised by two things: a prioritisation of the head, implemented through a compositional reduction of the portrait format from life-size to bust, and the direct illumination of the face in contrast to a darker rendering of the rest of the body. The immediate outcome of focusing on the head is that the head is the prime locus of physiognomy. Yet, the Aristotelian and Platonic employments of physiognomy differ radically. For instance, the Platonic (and dualist) model applies a physiognomic reading of the subject in order to access his or her inner being, hence the demand for a realist rendering of external appearance. The Aristotelian employment of physiognomy, on the other hand, is guided by a process of idealisation that leads to formal abstraction, in so far as the representation of the sitter’s facial characteristics are represented according to the desired outcomes of sitter and artist. The second chapter of the thesis addresses the origins of the Western European portrait, and the formation of the ‘self’ prior to the Enlightenment. This chapter includes an examination of painted portraits and self-portraits by various canonic artists of this period, where the construction of the concepts of interiority and subjectivity within painting are active. This chapter looks specifically at Dutch seventeenth-century portraiture and focuses on the way the emerging middle class chose to represent itself in relation to an emerging notion of the autonomous self. In addition, it examines the dialectical relationship between popular attempts at individual self-definition through portraiture and Rembrandt’s exploration of subjectivity and identity through the employment of self-portraiture.