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11Story
| Posing Questions: Being & image in Europe & Asia |  |
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Optical character recognition? |
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Since the European Renaissance, many artists, subjects and beholders have tried to recognize ‘inward truth’ in the external appearance of things: in portraiture, toexpose the mind in the face.
This prior, ideological assumption and objective has come to be called ‘mimetic idealism’. The art of trying to capture that ‘inner quality’ is so engrossing that theunsettling question of whether it exists at all (or, if so, why it should be located ‘inside’) is seldom posed.
Making an image life‐like can seduce the beholder, even if only for a moment, into expecting the animation or intentionality of a real person.
An accomplished artist triggers such expectations so that ‘seeing’ visually unverifiable character seems a revelation rather than an act of faith.
Mimetic idealism makes few claims on young, absorbed or emotional faces, those at odds with how their owners ‘ought’ to look, or when it is unclear how the unfamiliarshould look at all.
What about the ‘pseudo‐portrait’, an image of an apparently unknown subject? Did the artist use a model or memory ‐ or embroider on memory to ‘just make itup’? Whose character has been captured when it is uncertain whether the portrait represents a real person at all? And whose character does a spy’s face reveal? |
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