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THE HIVE OF SUBTLETY

I had seen faces in photographs I might have found beautiful had I known even vaguely in what beauty was suppo~d to consist. And my father’s relevant to man. But the faces of the hvtng, all grunace and flush, can they be described as objects?—Samuel Beckett

 

FACES AND THEIR LOOKALIKES IN THE HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY

In the world of surfaces, the face remains supreme. For we often imagine that it’s an indispensable guide, or perhaps even a reflection of our humanity. Yet in the world of meanings, the face exists only as a sign, perceived through its shifting aspects and its equivocal mien. Oscar Wilde quipped, “Only trust your superficial impressions.” But really, things are not so simple. How is one to take the fugitive sign as reference to the primal consciousness within? Obviously this task goes beyond semiotics; it’s a central job of living in society, and it frames the problem of the portrait.

Faces in the everyday impress us as hives of subtlety. That impression must be sharpened in photography, which discloses only a microsecond of the face’s behavior, immersed in a social process. Just the same, to the extent that the picture vivifies this process, it invites us in to the portrait enigma. Sociality is a flux, of which faces transmit expressive ripples. Though they’re refrigerated in photographs, the mind wants to defrost them with its warm interest in stories, narratives that we may imagine about the person. Of course, photographers quite frequently help us along by situating the sitter in an implied or definite social place. Here is a felon, they seem to say; there, a solid citizen. In portraits, social attributes or tags are generally found in tension with human idiosyncrasies. A faded smile or a hostile look might well inject a latent content into the declared story.

I hope these remarks sketch some recognizable terms of our engagement with the portrait genre. For they were in my mind when I saw an exhibition that confirmed and unsettled them simultaneously. “The Ghost in the Shell: Photography and the Human Soul, 1850-2000,” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, was loaded with postModernist specters. Unlike trendy shows of this kind in the past, this one juxtaposed fanciful depictions of the face, old as well as contemporary, with a good supply of straight portraiture. The result turned out to be the most problematic medley of their concerns. Curated by Robert Sobieszek, who also wrote the scholarly catalog, the show was designed to approach images of the face as successive cultural statements about the human psyche. Sobieszek says: “I am concerned . . . with the very real corporeality … of the human face, the mechanics by which our countenances articulate the inexpressible nature of the human spirit, and how this spirit has been and continues to be visually expressed through or represented by the camera arts.” (p. 15)

This is a worthwhile objective, but it ran constantly against the grain of the most resistant material— imagery with an institutional rationale that expressly ignores, or with an artistic license that depreciates, the human spirit.

Sobieszek himself takes no position on the conflict between observant portraiture and antihumanist representations of the face. He considers their simultaneous histories, not from the conventional standpoint of their genres, but in the light of naïve or inexact disciplines, like phrenology, Galtonian eugenics, psychiatry, and deconstructivist cultural theory. In doing this, he stresses the history of rather aggressive rhetorical attitudes toward the face, the pressure they exerted to objectify, vitiate, or distort it. Suppose we regard a likeness as a record of a person’s physical singularity: how he or she looks. But this bottom-line requirement emphasizes what is distinguishable, not what is individual about the sitter. What we seem to mean by the individuality of the sitter is an impression he or she makes as a self-managed ego, along any point on a scale from modest to proud . . . and beyond. Portrait photographers such as Edward S. Curtis and August Sander superimposed a collectivist program upon the individual style of their sitters. These image-makers thought of their subjects as representatives of a group, a tribe, or a profession: a Hopi warrior, a Dusseldorf accountant. Curtis was more coercive than Sander, and warmer. Still, both of them worked as nineteenthcentury liberals whose sketchy typecasting allowed sitters to project themselves beyond likeness into individuality—a state of which anthropological label or social status does not give a complete account.

“FORGOTTEN RECORDS OF SOME ARCANE, MALEVOLENT EXPERIMENTBIZARRE DEPICTIONS OF THE TORTURED… HUMAN FACE.”

Many nineteenthand twentieth-century photographers were actually not hostile to the face; they merely isolated the facial sign by treating it as a mask. Medical, criminal, and ethnographic portraits; AdolpheEugène Disderi, the creator of cartes-de-visite; László Moholy-Nagy, Robert Mapplethorpe, idealists of light or muscle; Annie Leibovitz’s celebrity shots; Nancy Burson and Keith Cottingham, virtuosi of facealtering computer manipulation: stylistically, these have little enough in common. Yet conceptually, they exhibit a weird solidarity. For time and again, they determine the role of the face while characteristically disregarding its

owner. A certain absence brings them together, an absence of inquisitiveness about the one before the camera. The light was on in their house of physiognomy, but no one was there.

In the first of the catalog’s three long essays, “Gymnastics of the Soul,” human consciousness is examined as it was understood in the mid-nineteenth century, as a demonstrable phenomenon. Guillaume Benjamin Duchenne de Boulogne, a French physiologist, undertook to study the emotional spectrum of faces by recourse to electrical stimulation, with results he caused to be photographed. When Sobieszek first encountered these images, they seemed “like the forgotten records of some arcane, malevolent experiment—bizarre depictions of the tortured . . . human face.” The features of an old man are convulsed with “mirth,” “fear,” or “surprise,” synthetically induced by electric prods in order to indicate what muscle systems produced these recognizable states. But, having shown that such expressions could be reproduced on a visage quite independently of the subject’s will, Duchenne did not prove that they were natural. Nor did his demonstrations that a human face was a mechanical system qualify them as portraits. The act of isolating a reflex, instead of portraying (from porträtiere, Latin—“to draw forth”) the human character within, only performs a reductive ritual, and an eerie one at that.

When Darwin used Duchenne’s photographs as illustrations in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, he overlooked the effect they had as pictures. For those traces of light revealed the visage of a particular man whose expression was unstrung from what he could feel or even simulate. This was not a sign that could be related to what it signified, but, rather, an experiment showing only that human features could be twitched, like a dead frog’s thigh. With an accidental clairvoyance, the materialist science of the nineteenth century here anticipated the existential dread of the twentieth.

For purposes of comparative measuring and bureaucratic identification, this materialism injected a kind of visual novocaine into all sorts of faces. They run from the impassive to the nondemonstrative, and on to the apathetic. The inertness that greets us in camera fodder from police superintendent Alphonse Bertillon’s mug shots or Désiré Charnay’s ethnographic forays in Madagascar survives to this day in passport photos and security cards. They are little icons within a monitor system, unrelated to the idea that a human may possess anything as intrusive and irrelevant as a soul. He or she is required only to provide the opportunity for a likeness.

face, on his death-bolster, had seemed to hint at some form of aesthetics

The values of traditional portraiture nevertheless pivot on the fortuitous interplay between a sitter’s ego and his or her membership in a community. When ego comes to the fore, it tends to isolate the face in its own internal drama, or even to resonate with a certain loneliness. When a photograph emphasizes the worldly placement of the sitter, on the other hand, the face’s performance impresses us as comfortable—the comfort of implied association—and gains in readability. Yet what excites us about portraiture is that, at the moment of exposure, regardless of what scripts have been prepared, all bets are off.

Sobieszek’s second essay in the catalog, having a different story to tell, links the scientific with the artistic misadventures of the face. He centers here on the work of Andy Warhol, who eulogized the leveling influence of the media upon personality. Walker Evans considered nameless faces with his vernacular spirit, infused by a democratic ethos. Sobieszek quotes William Carlos Williams on Evans: “We see what we have not heretofore realized, ourselves made worthy in our anonymity.” Warhol, for sure, approached his subjects in an antithetical spirit. Mostly celebrities, he treated them as interchangeable and degraded icons. You can say that Warhol had an antidemocratic outlook: we are “worthy”—if that is still the word—only in our uniformity, a state promoted by the replacement of popular culture by mass culture. Evans had implied that our diversity contributes to our common enterprise. (As in his photograph of a commercial portrait studio’s products, gridded in its window.) Warhol, for his part, imagined that the social good would be realized only once the diversity of our preferences has been eliminated. This is a contrast between Evans’s democratic principle and an authoritarian dream.

What followed in Modernist portraiture deserves to be called archaic. I refer to the effect of the stiff, frontal poses and the pre-psychological primitivism in the work, say, of Chuck Close and Thomas Ruff. With the mug shot, you merely reckon with a standard maintenance of distance from the personality of the subject. With Close and Ruff’s similar though over-life-size and evidently processed art, we have to deal with an offhand dispossession of humanity. It’s as if the “who-ness” of the subject were a condition either too sentimental or too conjectural to get worked up about. Sobieszek approvingly quotes J. M. Ballard: “the most terrifying casualty of the century [is] the death of affect.” One sometimes wonders if artists like Close and Ruff have thought enough about the difference between commenting upon this deathly aspect of the Zeitgeist and being a party to it.

The post-Modern recoil from such neutralized concepts, at any rate, circles right back into Victorian ideas of pantomime, hyperventilation, and even the human being in extremis. Cindy Sherman’s film stills and Oscar Rejlander’s narrative portraits accentuate physiognomic expression with a vengeance. This world of creatures who pull a face would resemble those of Duchenne’s world, but for the sense that they’re manipulated by dramatic strategies, not prodded by electric instruments. It’s a staging of gestures, innocently anecdotal in Rejlander; disingenuous, with alarmist overtones in Sherman (the keynote artist of Sobieszek’s last essay in the catalog).

“The Ghost in the Shell” hits its stride in discussing the etiology of post-Modern

manias and multiple personalities. A line runs from Dr. Charcot’s photos of hysterics through Bruce Nauman’s screaming clowns, who throw fits but have no passion. Where once Modernists had emptied the face of keen and singular response, now it appears to swoon with a capricious rapture or look bewitched, as if possessed by foreign bodies. Sometimes, too, the visage is savagely treated: it’s missing a nose or mouth, as in the computer-manipulated work of Aziz + Cucher.

What might the presence of all these unhinged, somnambulistic, or disfigured characters signify? Well, obviously, the portentous question asked by such images is not who’s there, at that moment, but what is the enduring human condi-

tion, as conceived in our time? The cultures reflected by such work are technical cultures, above all involved with the study and control of bodily impulse, or prosthetic extensions of it. Faces tend therefore to act as vehicles for symbolic statement, reinforced by a dreamy and suffocating atmosphere.

Fascinating and, of course, dismal in equal measure, this symbolism needs to pump individuality right out of the creatures it visualizes. The torrent of affect in post-Modernist depictions of the face does imply a criticism of withdrawn demeanor in Modernist portraiture.

Still, even though the one style is highly fictive and the other clinically factual, both are fixated by personal displacement. This is a serious theme, well handled in film and literature, but shallowly treated in photography. Douglas Gordon Scotchtapes his face with grotesque result, but he merely updates Duchenne; Cindy Sherman’s disjointed dolls radiate terror, but do not achieve pathos. Either we have an indefinite and chaotic array of physical signs, or a gallery of denatured “meanings,” looking for a sign. I won’t argue against such an artistic vision of de-individuated humanity as a metaphor for suffering in our times; I say only that the spectacle of it is quite a bummer.

There’s something perverse about a humanist treatise such as this, which accentuates the scientist Duchenne but neglects Nadar and slights Lewis Hiñe. The sociality of those portraitists is indivisible from the aesthetic—and complex—pleasure we take from their imagery. But the catalog avoids any talk of social pleasures; it leaves us to conclude that in portrait tradition only the anesthetic tendency matters, all others being of concern only insofar as they might be inveigled into its various currents. Duchenne anesthetized his subject, a literal treatment that became metaphorical as time went on.

Anesthesia is a pain-relieving measure that dopes and devitalizes the human organism. When artists inject an anesthetic style into that marvelous pliancy we know as the human face, it’s as if to avoid an intolerable condition. But no one imagines this faintness of heart to be a caring attitude. On the contrary, the anesthetic style is so involved with implying debility that it can’t be bothered to move us, or really, even to disturb us. For that experience, please consider the woman in Paul Strand’s Blind, whose bearing is so vulnerable, yet powerful, and yes, monstrous, that the contradictions of her presence could only have been the discovery of an inquisitive mind. As in the best portraits, so in this one, the stimulus arises out of a generosity extended toward others, even if it must recognize their pain.

Blind is such a vital and charged image that we don’t at first perceive its

lonely atmosphere. In that so many post-Modernlst faces are not exactly personable, they sometimes have this quality of loneliness, too. Something has gone wrong with their genetics; artificial or alien devices have taken over their bodies, cloning or metamorphoses of the uncanny sort that trace back to Ovid, now brought up to date by computer science and media. These pariahs live, if that’s not too strong a word, in an unsharable space. Frankenstein’s monster was imprisoned in that space and raged against it. When he emerges from anesthesia (death), he terrifies us by the vengeance he takes upon a society that cannot accept his difference.

By contrast, we perceive loneliness in portraiture as a state with which we can empathize. For it signifies that very recognizable and human condition of being among our fellows, but not with them. How often the feeling of it comes to us in a face shaded with regret or introspection. You can see it in Roy DeCarava’s Billie Holliday, as well as in the melancholy of Alfred Stieglitz’s portraits. Albert S. Southworth’s daguerreotypes have it, too. There’s something tender about the light in these umbrageous pictures, a hovering or modulated tone in which the characterization subsides. Yet, when we engage with these sitters, our tentative distance from them seems reduced, as if their self-reflectiveness had been drawn out to merge with our own.

Far from being marginal, this perception is common in the experience of portraiture. Without doubt, the characterization of loneliness is an artifice, contrived in different ratios by both the sitter and the portraitist. At the same time, the appeal of loneliness plays upon a social sentiment, a viewer’s solidarity with those who, higher or lower in worldly station, compose themselves before the lens for largely unknown and absent publics. An artist’s vision is possibly at stake on these occasions, but so is the subject’s dignity. And as the suspense of their encounter manifests itself, the open sense of the picture radiating with subtle possibilities, the sitters become part of our thought.

Max Kozloff