Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Reconfiguring the Portrait. Ed. Abraham Geil and Tomáš Jirsa. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023. 312p.

Review by Alexandra Irimia

25 July 2024

Fiery red strokes blend ground and figure in Jonathan Yeo’s portrait of King Charles III, the first official one since coronation. It is rare for a commissioned painting to elicit global attention and critical commentary, but this one did, both at the unveiling ceremony and after a (brief and reversible) act of vandalism by a group of animal-rights activists. Around the same time, aboriginal artist Vincent Namatjira’s caricature-style portrait of Australian mining heiress Gina Rinehart triggered a parallel wave of popular debate around the aesthetics and politics of portraiture, after the upset billionaire tried in vain to convince the National Gallery of Australia to remove the less-than-flattering image from public display. The resurgence of popular interest in the strategies and stakes of portraiture in contemporary culture indicates an apt moment to reconsider and, indeed, reconfigure this centuries-old, constantly evolving visual tradition.

As the two examples above reveal, the portrait extends well beyond its constitutive mimetic principle and becomes an effective site for contestation and critique, both as a tool and as a target thereof. It enacts and exposes a myriad of productive tensions between affirmation and contestation, presentation and withdrawal, individuality and social determinacy, interiority and exteriority, subjectivity and objectivity. This is one of the main arguments and conceptual thrusts brought forth by Reconfiguring the Portrait, a recent collection of fifteen illustrated essays that seeks to forge a contemporary theory of portraiture by situating its object at the intersection of disciplinary perspectives: philosophy of representation and the history of technology, post- and non-human ethics and multimedia aesthetics, gender studies, affect theory and thanatology, to name only the most prominent.

What strikes me as most original in the volume Tomáš Jirsa and Abraham Geil edited is precisely that, in adopting these multiple viewpoints, it contests the primacy of the art-historical narrative on the portrait and its traditional emphasis on the portrayed subject. A new exercise in portraiture literacy, the book unpacks a post-representational condition of the genre, whose analysis requires bringing into the picture (quite literally) questions of subjectivity, mediality, and technicality. As clearly unpacked and provocatively argued for in the book’s introduction, the threefold approach reframes the portrait in a more complex entanglement of media theory, social documentation, and biotechnological dynamics. A central and daring gesture of the book is to move the focus from ontology to performativity, asking not so much what the portrait is in the current technologically shaped media landscape, but rather what it does and how it functions and operates as a performative site. This is what sets this collection apart from previous efforts to think beyond the representational value of portraits.

Judging by the contributions of the sixteen authors in this collection, they all seem to agree that it is no longer sufficient to discuss portraits—be they classical paintings, Instagram selfies, virtual avatars, AI-generated faces, death masks, relational or even nonhuman portraits—departing solely from their subject configuration. Instead, regarding these artifacts as “media operations” and “configurations” of entangled referentiality, subjectivity, and mediality yields more productive and timely results than “the art-historical narrative about the end of portraiture as an iteration of the disappearance of the subject” (p. 6). In this light, rather than being seen as a mere representational artwork, the portrait can be rethought as “a set of cultural techniques for the dynamic performance of subjects (human and otherwise) entangled in specific media environments” (p. 6).

The four sections of the volume—“Genealogies,” “(Inter)faces,” “Self-constructions,” and “Afterlives”—provide structure to what could otherwise look like a disconcerting array of subjects and methodological approaches. But this is only one arrangement among many possible others, given that the contributions often resonate with one another across section headlines. To cite but a few examples, Roland Meyer’s new concept of the “operative portrait” helps to highlight how photographic portraiture has evolved from its origins in the nineteenth century to the instrumentation of faces as key biopolitical tools in contemporary big data and surveillance technologies (see pp. 21–42). Similar interactions between cultural practices of faciality and what Michel Foucault labeled “technologies of the self”[1] are exposed in Kate Rennebohm’s thoroughly researched discussion of “loss-of-self portraits” but also in a number of other studies about the face as an algorithmic abstraction artifact, media-affective interface, theologically anchored virtuality, or site of a gaze that mediates between the living and the dead. Questions of framing, intentionality, and agency in self-representation are inflected in the light of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the chapters by Sudeep Dasgupta, Kaisu Hynnä-Granberg and Susanna Paasonen, going even beyond the human with a case study on animal portraits. Dimming for a moment the chorus of sociohistorical context and interpretive discourse that often covers the stillness and the quietude of the sitting figure, Brian Price describes the portrait as “a scene of thought, and thus of social relations, to which we have no access” (p. 256). This essential inaccessibility of the interiority of the portrayed subject, even when understood in its social dimension, cannot be overlooked: it is there to remind us that representing the Other is a gesture that is aesthetic as much as it is political (see p. 253). Drawing from Jacques Rancière and Jean-Luc Nancy while also taking a step away from them, Price reflects on “portraits that ultimately honor silence,” a pensive absence irreducible to language that is first figural and ethical before being representational and medium-imposed (p. 257).

Ultimately, the book does not offer an exhaustive treatment of its subject. A more comprehensive approach would have included, for example, a nod towards the kin genres of textual or musical portraits; it would have considered perhaps group portraits as well, not only individual ones. What the volume accomplishes successfully, though, is to unsettle its readers’ foreknowledge about the doings and undoings of portraiture, while guiding them—at times descriptively, at times inquisitively—through the untamed complexities of the contemporary portrait.

[1] See Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst, Mass., 1988)