‘Realist practices of portraiture’: methodology and theory within contemporary art history

Join us for a work in progress seminar with speaker Owen Atkinson, Postgraduate Researcher in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies.

I will begin with the observation that contemporary capitalism promises identity – the reconciliation of subject and object, internal and external, represented and representation. This drives consumer choice and political mobilisation on both the left and the right. Physical portraits — and more importantly, access to the portrait-form of representation — are ubiquitous and yet, as a mode of self-conscious meaning-making, portraiture is seen as conceptually invisible or seemingly irrelevant.

Drawing from Theodor Adorno and György Lukács an argument about the (virtual) impossibility of identity within capitalism, I use Judith Butler’s phrase, ‘scenes of address’, to explore the ways in which ‘realist practices of portraiture’ reject this false promise of identity, but rather stage the mediation of identifications and experience.

I make an argument for ‘realist practices’ as those which, rather than reproducing the misidentifications produced by a reified world, instead encompass non-identity, the “fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived” (Adorno). 
 
Toward the end of the textual component of Allan Sekula’s 1973 photo-installation Aerospace Folktales, portraying his family, the voice associated with the artist writes, “this material is interesting only insofar as it is social material”.

How do portraits, that most functional and personal of traditional artistic genres, function as social material? There is a necessary negotiation here of the particular and the general, which converses with political developments of the 1970s (‘the personal is the political’), but also feeds into a broader, more methodological question.

In this paper, I will consider the way that I negotiated this question, thematically and formally, in my recently completed PhD, to explore more general theoretical and methodological questions for art history PhDs:

• What is the relationship between the art historical material studied and the broader world?
• What are the terms of the conversation between these disparate elements of the study?
• What is not relevant to such an enquiry?
• Does anything remain outside the boundaries of the discipline?

About the speaker

Owen Atkinson is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Leeds, where he has recently passed Viva on his completed thesis, entitled: “‘Scenes of address’: realist practices of portraiture within the art of the post-war United States”.

This project examined how the realist problematic is transformed within the time-based portraiture of Shirley Clarke and Allan Sekula in particular.

Owen is also an associate editor of parallax journal and has been involved in running the reading and discussion groups Quilting Points, Critical Materialisms Seminar Series, and Anti-Fascism Film Club. 

More information

This event is hosted by the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies.

It is free to attend and all are welcome.

For more information, please email Ross Truscott at R.Truscott@leeds.ac.uk.

Image

'Allan Sekula - Salty Dog Bites the Hand'. Photo by AGCC Studio Artist Slobodan Dimitrov. Licensed under Creative Commons licence.