In times of self-reflection in a flood of digital images, above all selfies, the portrait takes on a new importance. It remains a medium of re/presentation. However, often only
for the fleeting moment, it remains accessible to everyone in the cloud for years.
Using aesthetic means, my work has for years revolved around questions of our fleeting memory storage, of the thrown-in, scratched-in, of drawings as spontaneous creations that satisfy the moment but are actually intended for eternity. The artistic stance, a sketch by Leonardo da Vinci, for example, which refers to the author, confirming his identity, is a process that Occidental visual arts have known since the Renaissance at the latest.
What does it mean when this process is applied to school desks, to windows on public transport systems, to monuments and structures such as the Great Wall of China? Does it reflect an aestheticisation of everyday life or does it imply that everyone is an artist? Why does a material trace have to be accompanied by a selfie for the Internet? This phenomenon is not tied to social class or education.
The President of the Republic of Slovenia is just as happy when, on the occasion of the Biennial of Graphic Art in Ljubljana, he is allowed to scratch something into one of my glass guestbooks, as the museum director in Bremen or the homeless person who has travelled all the way to Kassel for the documenta. And what about the selfie for social media? We feel that it is in flux and feel no power over whether and how it is disappears into the ocean of bits and bytes.
In my EPOFAKT gameplay staging, some 300 small images are created within two to three hours: three survive in a fictitious museum.
In DeskXistance, a global study, the scratchings and scarification of over 300 school desk table tops, created over years by pupils during their lessons, are turned into prints.
In Existentmale, likewise a global study, the windows of underground trains scratched by youths are turned into prints.
And in Wandmale – Stigmata, attempts to create an individual existence through name carving at cultural-historical sites are recorded by means of frottage.
Protelics will provide a better alternative to what seems to me a desperate attempt to become visible in the crowd, be it through physical inscriptions or selfies posted on Facebook. One can create one’s portrait with one’s own skin or through one’s face, with its corporeal marks of life. The self is already there – it only has to be transferred to be immediately present in the image.
In this portrait, the protagonist is not interpreted by the “artist’s hand”: the experimental arrangement and the process of portraiture are the artefact. The sitter will simply be present through his or her own proteins. But not just any proteins. They don’t trace the physiognomy of the face. They are not mimetic, but were – before the filter paper was applied, the actual epidermis of the face, its protective skin.
Portrait painting and photography are two-dimensional. A human face is three-dimensional. A healthy skin is full of life: sweat, fats, proteins, and bacteria.
At the latest since the Renaissance, our visual habit of facial recognition is taken for granted and hardly raises the question as to what we are actually recognising. We can usually assign the face to a specific person. This process is confirmed and reinforced by digitised facial recognition and biometric data. Despite 3-D models, any representation on the screen remains two-dimensional.
Why should the distance between the eyes and the length of the nose be more important and more interesting to me as a counterpart than all the stories told by the skin?