"The unreal is no longer that of a dream or of fantasy, of a beyond or a within, it is that of hallucinatory resemblance of the real with itself." The Unreal Person: Portraiture in the Digital Age is a cacophony of hallucinations, a psychedelic kaleidoscope of deception. These artists face the constant bombardment of the hyperreal world of simulacra. They are transformed and they make portraits that illuminate the epiphanies of that experience. They use the omnipresent instrument of our age, the computer, to create mutations that inform issues of identity, meaning, culture, gender, fantasy, art making and politics. Portraiture is fiction, and we can choose to reveal ourselves, like Dorian Gray, in any form that we wish. According to Baudrillard, "We live everywhere already in an 'esthetic' hallucination of reality." 3 Since the 1980's the entire process in which photographic images are captured, produced, and stored has changed. The analog photograph was a precise recording of the world created by unbroken subtle gradations of light captured on film. These images were executed by the use of a camera that recorded the exact image perceived by the photographer as he looked through the lens and snapped the picture. They were a precise record of 'reality'. 'The camera does not lie,' we were told. We believed what we saw. Photography was our tool for documenting the world. The technical manipulation of images was difficult and not part of predominant photographic practice. When these manipulations were attempted, they were usually obvious to the human eye. This is no longer the case. Photography has entered a brave new era. It has become as liquid as painting. The effects and images that can be created are limited only by the imagination. The difference is that these images appear 'real' in a way that painting, because of its surface, does not. However, they are in fact 'unreal'. Photography has become seamless collage. These extraordinary changes in our culture and artistic practice have been made possible due to the proliferation of powerful personal computers, graphic interfaces and image manipulation software which first came to public awareness in the later 1980's and whose uses have grown exponentially in the 1990's. Our information age has brought an explosion of sources of images that are as available to artists as they are to the public. These images are then scanned into the computer and become fodder for the artist to interpret. Our unequivocal cultural narcissism is particularly revealed by the ubiquitous erasure of what are considered 'flaws' in the appearance of ideals in popular media. Photographs are routinely retouched digitally to erase any 'unevenness of tone', wrinkles or lines or other 'imperfections'. These faces and bodies are often resculpted digitally to create ideals of 'beauty' and 'perfection' unattainable in real life at any age. These alterations are undetectable to the viewer so that when we look at ourselves in the mirror, we continuously pale by comparison. There is an extremely eerie and visually intense quality to many of the images in the Unreal Person: Portraiture in the Digital Age. The exasperation of artists within the excessive production of idealized imagery is eloquently revealed in this exhibition. The ordeal of society is reflected back in a parodic mirror of cultural visual output. The fictional people depicted here present themselves in a sort of Kafkaesque vision of a hyperreal world created by man rather than the earlier version of the Dantesque nightmare created by God. Many of the people whose portraits make up the content of this exhibition do not exist in the real world at all, they are wholly the fabrication of the artists. William Wegman created his visionary piece, Family Combinations, in 1972. The work predates the use of computers in art making. Yet it contains many of the ideas that artists would later explore using this new technology. It contains the humorous attitude that are a hallmark of Wegman's style but with an unexpected twist. The artist presents a grid of six portraits. The top three photographs depict the artist, his mother and his father staring straight into the camera. They all have a deadpan expression, almost resembling photographs one might take for a driver's license or passport. The bottom three pictures are superimposed photographs of the top three images of the artist first combined with the image of his mother, then his father and with the final representation being his mother and his father's images combined. His technique produces a visual 'morph', a technique which is now executed routinely on the computer. The bizarre and amusing component of all these portraits is their visual similarity both in expression and in features. It is as if Wegman is saying that with relatives such as parents or spouses, eventually we become them. Or, we are them to begin with. Another artwork in the exhibition that simulates morphing is Don Suggs' Portrait Machine. The piece was created as a response to Duchamp's declaration during the Dada years that photographs had rendered paintings unnecessary. At that time, Duchamp also predicted that photographs would one day be replaced by another pictorial technology. The work is a cubicle that has two projectors simultaneously propelling images in real time on to a canvas with a classical frame around it. Don Suggs began collecting these portraits of historical personages and assorted paintings from art history in the early 1970s for use as a teaching tool in his painting classes. He would project several variations simultaneously on the wall of the classroom and instruct his students to use the composites as source materials for their paintings. He combined personages such as Picasso with Stalin, J.P. Morgan with Mao, Henry Ford with Lenin, Judy Garland with Oscar Levant, and an Ashile Gorky painting of a Woman with a portrait of Gorky by Modigliani. Suggs particularly chose images that had some facial features in common so that the images would fuse together. He also chose images that had some ideological reason to be linked. For example, Picasso was a communist and an early supporter of Stalin before the dictator's true brutality was revealed. It was only recently that Suggs began to turn these source materials into artworks and created the Portrait Machine. The whole mechanism embodies three 'frames' of reference. First, the historical reduction of imagery in painting. Secondly, the alleged displacement of paintings by photographs. Finally, the bridge between mechanical and digital technologies and the question of the continued role of the mechanically produced photograph in an age of computer generated images. Nancy Burson was one of the first artists to realize the creative potential of linking computers with photography in the early 1980's. Her patented aging machine, which simulated the process of aging in the human face, not only pioneered the current artistic practice of 'morphing' and computer altered photography, but was also licensed by the FBI. The aging machine has been successfully used to locate missing children, even years after their disappearance. The machine was a collaboration with Burson's spouse, David Kromlich. It combined images of the missing child's pictures at the time of their disappearance with those of an older family member. It showed, often quite accurately, how the child's face might change over time. She with He, 1996 and He with She, 1996 are part of Burson's twenty year undertaking of a profound exploration of the human face. They are morphs of male and female faces, representations of androgyny. Burson preserves the appearance of layering in the morphing process as the apparition of one image is seen through the other. These faces emerge like visitors from another world, or a future time. Androgyny, these pictures seem to be saying, is a state that we, as a species, is evolving into. Burson displays the transformation in mid stream as if we are looking at a hallucination that is being created before our eyes. Change in context and therefore meaning is the issue in Craig Ashby's Couplings: Inverting Relations (Nadia and Brian #1), 1997. This topic is dominant in debates on digital culture. Films like Forrest Gump place fictional characters in scenes within historic contexts. In this series, changes are subtle, barely discernible and therefore more subversive. Ashby presents couples who either live together or are married. He photographs them separately but instructs each to pose as they imagine their partner would want themselves portrayed. He then combines both pictures digitally so that both subjects appear to be occupying in the same space. The style is pure documentation yet the result is a fictional portrait. We become aware of this only upon close observance when we discern the seam between the images. We gain insight into how each partner observes the other. The artwork discloses the image each party wants to project to the viewer about themselves and their partner. Daniel Lee's Self Portraits I-V, display visual transformations by way of special effects. The results visually resemble morphing. However, they are 'painted' by the artist using only one photograph as source information that is manipulated. He displays a Darwinian fictional evolution of four portraits. The first two are altered digitally in paint programs to show how the artist imagines his ancestors in prehistoric times might have appeared e.g. as apes and their evolution to early man. The third image is the unmanipulated source photograph of the artist himself as he appears now. In the fourth picture, he is transformed as human beings might appear in the future. He explains his selection for revisions in his facial features thus, "Because technology changes the way we live and the way we create, it also changes the way we look. My eyes shrink as electricity eradicates the need to see in the dark. My brain and forehead enlarge as information expands my mind. My features blend as communication brings cultures closer and closer together- Asian, Caucasian and so on. Only the ears remain the same size because we will never stop needing to listen." How will technology effect our development as a species? This is a question that many artists, including Daniel Lee are asking. Dorit Cypis refers to pieces such as Hybrid Eyes as "psycho-portraits," each revealing an inner hidden identity of the subject, provoking the social/psychological/fantasy memory of the perceiver. She presents an edited portrait exhibiting only the eyes of her subject. These pieces are particularly strange because each individual eye is taken from a different source. Because we see no other facial features we are unsure if these eyes belong to a person or an animal such as a cat or is a hybrid of the two. The transformation of humans into animals is a popular theme in media. Each panel is composed of the subject moving through multiple projections of images they have chosen from their autobiography and from culture. Their movements fragment and recompose relationships between their body, their shadow and parts of their projected images. Cypis watches these mutating relationships through her camera and when she sees a provocative framing, she asks the subject to freeze their position and she photographs them. Each final print is informed by a map outline (stat) identifying the various characters in the image and their relationship to the subject. A piece that poignantly critiques the idealization of images in popular culture is Meg Cranston's, The Average American, 1996. She used data gathered by the National Center for Health Statistics and the United States Bureau of the Census (Census 1990). She submits a life-size nude portrait created via morphing of a 32.9 year old person who is the sex, age, weight, height, breast size, haircolor, hair length, etc., of the average American as shown in the statistics. Her scientific approach carries through the entire presentation with the framing being similar to the institutional items used for displays in government buildings. She installs the work to the floor so that the viewer is confronted face to face with the image. We ask ourselves how we compare. Cranston's unsentimental documentary presentation is a reality check for a society plagued by eating disorders and rampant plastic surgery. The picture we are presented with is older, heavier, and shorter than most of the images of idealized women that we are bombarded with every time we watch television, open up a magazine or read a newspaper. We comfortingly recognize her as being closer to ourselves. Keith Cottingham identifies the flip side of this same issue in his, Triplets. This artwork exemplifies the capability of the computer to depict fictional characters. These are completely virtual people yet they appear convincingly real. The viewer is mesmerized by the hyppereal apparition of an almost Classical idealization of the youthful male form. The artwork is created entirely artificially. Cottingham builds a sculptural armature that he photographs and scans into the computer. He takes photographs of himself and others that he deconstructs substantially and then reconstructs on the armature digitally. These characters are so spectacularly and flawlessly exquisite that they posses an almost hauntingly disturbing fascist aesthetic. They exceed and therefore comment on the perverted preoccupation with youth and beauty in our culture. Triplets realizes digitally a contemporary update on the Aryan dream of cloning. Pae White downloaded the source images for Untitled (Gold) from the internet from a site specifically devoted to fetishes of people involved in covering themselves in metallic paints. She subsequently tweaked and cropped the picture on her computer. Her work reveals the idealization of the human figure as exemplified by pornography. Formally these pieces are ravishing and resemble friezes on Greek temples such as the Battle of the Gods and Giants at the north frieze of the Treasury of the Siphnians at Delphi. White's contemporary characters, chained together by choice and standing erect, resemble slaves from that ancient world. The color of the gold paint is intensified by White digitally. She describes this process as "turning up the temperature" that magnifies the effect, objectifies its subjects and makes them appear more like sculpture. The piece is enlarged to the scale of six feet wide. This amplifies the pixels and heightens its abstract, distant quality. Pornography has become a prevalent aspect of our society. White's artwork makes us quiver at the pleasure of its haunting beauty. Joseph Santarromana's It's Alive #152, 1997 is a multimedia portrait. The piece critiques the medium by which it is made because the medium is about creating fiction. The depiction is composed of two elements. The artist presents a simulated life size figure. Its head is a morph of the artist combined with a Hollywood head shot of the actor Bella Lugosi as Frankenstein's Monster. Its feet is a video of the artist's own feet shot in real time. Frankenstein's monster was the story of a character who was fabricated artificially, perceived as threatening to society, and suffered persecution. The artwork moves back and forth between fiction and reality in both time and space. Have we created a monster by the invention of this new technology? Has Hollywood culture become so pervasive that we cannot distinguish it as artificial? This piece is an anthropomorphic realization of these dilemmas. Rose Freeland's Beauty, 1998 is a morph of a ceramic figurine of Belle from Disney's Beauty and the Beast combined with a likeness of the artist. Freeland radically transforms Belle into a contemporary person and references her to art history at the same time. She places her combined character in a contemporary setting doing 'woman's work' but with a subversive twist. She is cleaning a video circuit board with a bottle of cleaner labeled 'promise'. There is irony in this action because cleaning a circuit board would cause it to short circuit. Freeland's promise in the work is to create a situation that would metaphorically short circuit her character's action and thereby sow seeds of the destruction of its situation. The set that Freeland has digitally painted refers to the lighting and structure of Vermeer's interiors. A stream of light from the left was typical. These paintings, like Freeland's updated digital version, were often depictions of women executing their daily chores. Only now the domain has changed. The character consummates the expectation to be alluring, as demanded by our culture, and she is still fulfilling domestic chores, though hopefully not for long. Belle is the most learned of Disney's heroines. The treasure that she receives at the end of the story is not a wedding to a prince but rather the gift of a library in the castle of the Beast. Here, books are more valuable than pearls. Ken Gonzalez-Day's pieces are transformed self portraits. Untitled # 19 shows a grotesque countenance. The artist has radically remodeled his face from a Latino person with delicate features and darker skin to a weird, lumpy, scar-faced, pallid white, ghost- like and repulsive apparition. He has done this by digitally depleting his racial genealogy. The artwork is a parody of painting and is similar in content and in color palette to the late works of Goya. Goya painted his time by biting portrayals of human indulgence. Gonzalez-Day brings us a haunting contemporary equivalent. The surface of the work, although photographic, simulates the look of an aging cracking painting surface. The issue of being marginal in society is a subject that permeates much of Gonzalez-Day's oeuvre. In this work, however, he mutates his identity into the opposite and depicts a twisted soul with the affliction of privilege. Richard Hawkins' disembodied zombie ben green, 1997 is a gruesome mutation of the visage of a beautiful young boy. The subject Ben Arnold, an image taken from a magazine glossy, is shown decapitated, with his severed neck oozing streams of black blood, his pallid bluish skin drained of life. He floats in a digitally created field of pulsating psychedelic color as if he is being carried off into an imaginary world. Hawkins takes the object of his erotic obsession and longing and digitally transforms him into the eerie manifestation of his disappointment. The portrait becomes what he describes as a zombie, not quite dead but somehow not alive either. The decapitated head, is a reference to Mishima, whose suicide also contained aspects of the physical embodiment of beauty in its ritualized horror. For the viewer as well, the quest for beauty, somehow just beyond our reach, seems unattainable. Our excessive societal need for beauty has become horrific. John Boskovich amusing project ,The Queen of Cups Series,1997 is a lighthearted romp through consumer culture. The work is a series of eighteen drinking mugs with comical images of the artist's face and bald head inserted in the heads and bodies of Las Vegas performers. The work was created at the mall of the Caesar's Palace Hotel in Las Vegas at an instant photo concession. The concession provided life-size photographs of assorted Las Vegas personalities with their heads cut out. The artist stood behind the pictures, inserted his visage into them and chose his expression. He considers this method acting. He was photographed by a digital camera that simulated drag. His purpose was to create changes in identity and what he terms "instant Cindy Shermans". As he was striking his various poses, the representations were projected instantaneously on monitors placed in the mall. This caused quite a stir among the passers-by in a context still unaccustomed to blatant depictions of homosexuals. The images were applied to the mugs and transformed into frolicsome camp relics. Mariko Mori's Tea Ceremony III, (1995) is a witty staged portrait of the artist, dressed as a Japanese action figure posing on the streets of her hometown of Tokyo. She calls the character a cyborg. This work is a documentation of a performance, based on Japanese kosupure (costume play, a fad for dressing up as magna comic book and anime film characters). Mori's extravagantly attired cyber-office woman is handing out tea to passers-by in front of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government offices. In this work, she parodies the consumer culture and the sexism of Japan's social mores. Mori's polished product seduces the viewer into a futuristic mirage humorously manifesting her embracing critique of science fiction, comics, sex, advertising, technology and fashion. The work is intensified digitally and the objectification is complete. Tea Ceremony III is a window into the stylized, consumer-driven futuristic planet we are whirling into. The portraits in The Unreal Person: Portraiture in the Digital Age utilize the tools of this new medium while confronting the profound societal implications of its use. These portraits show no emotion, yet they reveal so much about how we see ourselves at the end of the 20th Century.
"In this delusive attachment to himself, man generates his madness like a mirage."
Michel Foucault 1
Jean Baudrillard 2
1 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Vintage Books Edition, 1988) p.23
2 Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman, (New York: Semiotext(e) and Jean Baudrillard, 1983), p. 142
3 Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, p.148
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