QUT Digital Repository: http://eprints.qut.edu.au/ Robb, Charles (2008) The Self as Subject and Sculpture. Masters by Research thesis, Monash University. © Copyright 2008 Charles Robb The Self as Subject and Sculpture Charles Robb BA (Hons) QUT BFA (Sculpture) VicCollArts Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Fine Art 2008 Faculty of Art and Design MONASH UNIVERSITY Table of Contents Abstract 2 Statement of Originality 3 Acknowledgements 4 Introduction 5 Methodology 6 The Origins of the Portrait Bust 7 Self-Portraiture and the Portrait Bust: Contemporary Contexts 15 The Self-Portrait Bust as Practice 23 Conclusion 34 Figures 36 Bibliography 50 Notes 52 1 Abstract This paper analyses and contextualises the artist’s exploration of self-portraiture through the sculptural bust format. Conventionally, the portrait bust epitomises an antiquated view of the human subject as fixed, finite and knowable. The classicistic allusion of the form seems the perfect embodiment of a pre-modern and hopelessly idealised view of subjectivity and its capacity to be represented. This paper will show how, despite these impressions, the portrait bust is in fact a highly volatile sculptural form in which presence and absence are brought into question. When used as a vehicle for self-portraiture the bust yields a spectrum of instability, both literal and metaphoric, that calls into question the clarity of notions of subject and object and challenges the ideas of authority and representation more broadly. By providing an historical overview of the role of the portrait bust, this paper will map the field of content inherent to the portrait bust and discuss its application in contemporary self-portraiture. As the work of Mike Parr, Janine Antoni and Marc Quinn demonstrates, the classical certainty that permeates the bust format can indeed heighten the capacity of the form to represent uncertainty: an ambiguity that makes it a highly potent form for sustained studio investigation and experimentation. This paper will provide an overview of this experimental scope and application, by discussing the author’s process of sculptural self-portraiture in relation to aspects of ‘likeness’, expression, truncation and reproduction that occur in the form. 2 Statement of Originality This documentation contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in any other university, and, to the best of my knowledge and belief, contains no material previously published or written by another person, except where due reference is made in the text of the documentation. Charles Robb 3 Acknowledgements Firstly, I would like to acknowledge the invaluable support and feedback of my supervisor, Dr Dan Wollmering, whose encouragement and academic stewardship through the difficulties of external studies has been highly instrumental in the realisation of this project. I would also like to express my gratitude to my colleagues at QUT Visual Arts, Dan Mafe and Mark Webb who acted as sounding boards for many of the ideas in this paper and whose experience and critical insight was, and remains, a great source of creative energy to me. However, my greatest thanks I reserve for my partner, Dr Courtney Pedersen, whose critical feedback, editing assistance, technical advice and moral support (often under adversity) have been hugely influential to both this project and my practice more broadly and deserve stronger praise than words can provide. And finally, I would like to acknowledge Dr Ross Moore, who provided the initial impetus for me to enrol in the Faculty of Art and Design and enabled me to understand that I had a research topic worthy of MFA study. 4 Introduction This documentation will provide an overview, analysis and contextualisation of the main features of my studio practice: the exploration of self-portraiture through the sculptural bust format. My study of the portrait bust has emerged from the process of sculptural self- portraiture. If my initial motivation behind making sculptural self-portraits was to explore notions of identity and the body, this eventually yielded to the more open-ended concerns associated with subjectivity and representation; how does one represent oneself through the sculptural medium? My research seeks not to solve this problem but rather to represent the ‘problem’ of representation itself. This process of self-reflexivity enables my sculptural self-portraiture to address the impossibility of representation more generally. It is my chief claim that far from being an exhausted anachronism, the portrait bust remains a vital area for research, both inside and outside the studio. At first glance, the portrait bust is the epitome of a pre-modernist attitude to representation: deferential, classicistic and nostalgic. But the bust is in fact a highly volatile and complex sculptural form that challenges the clarity of notions of presence and absence. When used as a vehicle for self-portraiture this volatility is exacerbated. The self-portrait bust, by proposing an equivalence between the body of the subject and its sculptural representation, gives rise to a spectrum of instability, both literal and metaphoric. This destabilising effect serves to disrupt the clear delineation of subject and object and, by extension, the transparent operations of authority and representation. It is my contention that the classical certainty that permeates the bust format encourages and heightens the capacity of the form to represent uncertainty. It can be argued that this ambiguity reflects the broader indeterminacies that characterise contemporary notions of subjectivity. In so doing, the self-portrait bust emerges as a highly potent form for sustained investigation and experimentation in the contemporary studio. This paper will provide an account of this process and the ideas that inform the work and are generated by it. I will begin with a brief account of the methodological 5 approaches that influence the studio practice and this analysis. I will then provide an overview of the history of the portrait bust that will summarise the inherent meanings that have accrued to the portrait bust over time. The way in which the process of self- portraiture extends and complicates these meanings will be explored with reference the works of three contemporary practitioners who have explored the self-portrait bust in their artistic practices: Mike Parr, Janine Antoni and Marc Quinn. This contextualisation will then act as an entrée to a study of the key features of the self-portrait bust which give rise to its volatility as a form and which can be explored through an experimental studio process. In so doing, this paper will act as theorisation of my studio work – the organisation and structuring of the knowledge produced – while also establishing the pertinence of this studio enquiry to broader cultural discourse surrounding self- portraiture, subjectivity and representation. Methodology My research is conducted across two broad analytical modes – practice-based and pure basic. In keeping with the unique character of studio-based research, these two methodological approaches are ‘interleaved’ in the studio: the investigation of art- historical discourse is folded into the productive process, which in turn produces new research avenues. Based on material experimentation and reflection, this practice is an example of what Paul Carter has termed “material thinking”1. In Carter’s formulation, materials have an intrinsic intelligence that forms the unique basis of creative research. This intelligence emerges from the creative process and is consolidated by it formalisation in language. For Carter, material thought requires textual expression for validation. As Barbara Bolt notes though, Carter’s explication ultimately subordinates the activities within the studio by favouring their verbal articulation. She revises his theory as follows: ‘material thinking involves a particular responsiveness to or conjunction with the intelligence of materials and processes in practice… [it is] the logic of practice’2. Unlike Carter, Bolt sees the collaboration between artist and material as the chief site of research in the studio from which knowledge emerges. For her, the written exegesis plays a complementary rather than displacing role to the research process as its purpose is ‘not 6 just to explain or contextualise a practice, but rather to produce movement in thought itself’3. For Bolt, the written study creates a space where praxical and theoretical understandings can intersect and cross-fertilise. According to this model, analysis is necessarily folded into the act of making without reducing the studio process to a programmatic one. As a documentation of my creative research, the task of this paper is an exegetical one: to identify and analyse the most significant features of my work and the factors that shape its formation in the studio. By providing an investigation of my practice and the knowledge that it has given rise to, I hope to enable this analytical document to perform as a extension of the experimental method that underpins my practice. In so doing, this exegesis seeks to fulfil the role of ‘revealing the work of art’4 (to use Bolt’s words again) and in so doing make it act as a lens through which to refract studio-derived understandings into broader cultural discourse. The Origins of the Portrait Bust The portrait bust can be defined as a sculpted likeness in which the head and upper part of the body are isolated. While “likeness” can assume a variety of interpretations (as I shall elaborate on below), the truncation of the lower body – its abrupt excision – is the essential feature of the portrait bust. In this section, I shall provide a summary of the meanings inherent to the portrait bust as a sculptural format by outlining in broad terms its development since Roman times. My interest in the portrait bust stems from its strong association with the notions of individual subjectivity and Neo-Classical nostalgia. As a result, I have confined this study to the exploration of what Malcolm Baker refers to as the ‘classicising’ bust: the bust that applies stylistic features overtly derived from Classical sculpture5.