Tag: surface

Seeing Ourselves: Women’s Self-Portraits by Francis Borzello

I recently finished this book by Frances Borzello, who also wrote The Naked Nude which I wrote about here and here. Seeing Ourselves provides some (euro-centric) history of and commentary on women’s self-portraits from the 16th-21st century. It was first published in 1998 and was revised and expanded in 2016.

Some quotes, notes and thoughts:

  • Interesting links between women, self-portraiture, and depictions of the self at work or as an artist. Commenting on trends in the 16th century, Borzello writes, “While all woman artists wanted to look as gracious as the ladies in portraits, the passivity and limited range of activities displayed in them was of little use in inventing ways to show off their professional skills. When an activity is shown, it is with decorum. The sitter holds a book or lays a calming hand on a small dog nestling in her voluminous skirt. Frequently she clasps her hands in a pose that resonates with prayer, constriction and passivity. Accessories are limited to a flower, child, fan or piece of embroidery. Since ‘lady’ and ‘career’ were contradictory concepts, women in portraits were expected to look neither active nor skilled.”

  • On Angelica Kauffman’s 1791 painting Self-portrait: Hesitating Between the Arts of Music and Painting Borzello writes, “Traditionally muses and personifications of the arts were female and artists were male. By inserting herself, a woman, between two other women, she presents a world of female creativity. The dynamic line of the composition, taking the viewer from the sheet of music along Painting’s outstretched arm tells a story of female energy and aspiration.”
  • Borzello describes an 1887 painting by Anna Bilinska titled Self-portrait with Apron and Brushes. She writes, “… Anna Bilinska paints herself taking a break from her work. She is convincingly scruffy. She has not bothered to remove her apron, and, although her hair began the day pinned up, some tendrils have escaped. As she sits on a homely bentwood chair, she bends forward to gaze intently at the spectator, a bunch of brushes held across her apron in one hand and her palette hanging down at the extremity of the other. The capacity of the language of self-portraiture to address women’s changing view of themselves is revealed in her pose, which had not been seen before. Bilinksa has set herself down in front of a curtain, which acts as the background for a model. The combination of transitory pose and backcloth is an understated but witty way of telling the viewer that she has become – but only temporarily – the model, not the artist.”

  • I liked the observations of links between self-portrait photography, vanity and mirrors. Borzello writes, “Since vanity for was centuries personified by a woman looking in a mirror, a female self-portrait is evidence of this female vice, a real-life personification in the manner of Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self-portrait as ‘La Pittura’, but far more damning. This negative view of women and their self-portraiture is part of a larger set of attitudes about women and art, all stemming from the fact that the female artist was a minority member of the art world with little control over the judgements, views and rules affecting her.”

  • Later, she writes about photography and reflections/reflective surfaces and how the mirror, “throwing off its link with vanity” is now “used to suggest the complexity of being human. Reflections fascinated photographers. The twentieth-century project of self-scrutiny was tailor-made for them and many charted their lives through their self-portraits.” She also writes, “As for that damning link of women, mirrors and vanity, I hope the self-portraits prove just how empty it is. women artists, and in particular photographers, make extremely creative use of the mirror. Vivian Maier, for example, a reclusive children’s nanny whose thousands of photographs were not revealed to the world until 2013, took self-portraits in any reflective surface she came across: shop windows, wing mirrors, wall mirrors. … Employed to care for others, secretive about her passion for photography, he self-portraits have less to do with vanity than with the creative possibilities of her craft and her untiring curiosity about the world around her.” I love mirrors and reflective surfaces and using them in my work.
  • Borzello writes about selfies and compares them to the artist’s self-portrait. She writes, “What is new about the selfie is the lack of agency. The one thing that defines it – the spur of the moment – is the one thing a self-portrait is not. Unlike an artist producing an image, the selfie-taker requires little thought or skill beyond the need to get one’s head in the picture and, if possible, to present one’s best angle. ‘Duckface’, selfie shorthand for the exaggerated lip pout, requires the palest shadow of the thought and skill required for the composition, colouring and explanatory surroundings and accessories of an artistically considered self-portrait. Even the fastest photographic self-portraitist needs experience and a moment to compose, crop and angle, not to mention the skills that come into play afterwards in the darkroom or through adjustments to the image on the computer. The selfie is the self-portrait democratised. Its distorted faces, inconvenient hands, hopeful attempts at looking great and hopeless attempts at humour that only interest and amuse the participants and their circle clarify the art involved in the artist’s self-portrait.”
  • The way she writes about selfies doesn’t resonate with me. It seems pretty judgemental and reductive. Selfies are a form of self-portrait but they are not works of art by default, just like any photo that any person takes is not a work of art by default. Therefore, it seems unnecessary to me to compare the two things and state that taking a selfie takes little effort or skill. Also, not all selfies are made with the intention of creating art but selfies and art are not mutually exclusive. My self-portraits are often selfies and they are also works of art. I would also argue that a lot of selfies are in fact not very “spur of the moment” and that selfie-takers often put a lot of thought into creating and editing their images, even if they are not making them with the view of making works of art. A lot of my self-portraits are quite “spur of the moment” and the poses and moments that I capture are often somewhat unplanned and accidental. Does that make them not artistic?
  • It’s interesting to look at photos like these that would have been quite novel at one time and are now a very recognisable style of image:
  • Mirror selfies and selfies in which a camera is visible must come very naturally to people. I have taken photos like that since I was a teenager and at that time I had no reference for it. I wasn’t aware that people had been doing this since it was possible, I hadn’t yet seen photos like the ones above. It was such a natural inclination for me, to want to capture the self and to see the self reflected in a mirror and to then want to capture this reflection. And not just capture the reflection but capture myself capturing the reflection.
  • Overall, Borzello’s argument is that self-portraits made by women are their own genre. She writes, “I came to the conclusion that no self-portrait by a woman could be taken for granted. Whether it was ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or ‘powerful’ seemed of less interest than the fact that a female face signals a radical departure from the norm and is therefore enough to stop the image being read in the same way that a male self-portrait is.” I agree that self-portraits by women will always be read differently to self-portraits made by men. Women will always have to justify what they do with their bodies and how they present their bodies more than men do. Images of women, especially self-portraits, are therefore much more loaded by default.

silhouette self-portraits

I made these self-portraits yesterday in a kind of accidental way. I was getting changed to take some of my usual self-portraits and I noticed the silhouette of my body on the wall in the light and took these.

I like experimenting with ways to subtly distort or strain my body in my photos, usually I do that by physically putting myself in certain positions. With these, I didn’t have to really do anything strenuous with my body, the shadow and light distorted things and created a strangeness naturally.

class 1/2/24

In class Linett asked us to consider what has been our constant thread that has been with us and shows up in our practice.

I thought about performance, playing characters, the creation of persona. When I was little, I liked pretending to be someone else and I loved the creation of character. I loved reading and whenever I read a character I liked I would imagine what it would be like to be that character to a kind of obsessive degree. I would imagine their life, beyond the story within the book, and I would intertwine it with my own life, imagining what it would be like to transform into being that person. I have early memories of feeling overwhelmed by how there were so many different characters (people) in the world. I couldn’t get my head around the vastness. I was overwhelmed by the details and specificities of all the different lives. I can see now that I was particularly interested in how things appeared on the surface. The details of people’s clothes and style, the homes or spaces they inhabited and the way these spaces looked, their belongings. I liked dressing up in costumes.

When I was twelve I decided I wanted to be an actor and I remained very focused on that goal for a long time. I studied acting at uni and pursued acting for a few years after I graduated. I also became interested in playwriting and then that slowly took over my desire to be an actor. I think my desire to be an actor was so precious to me that it was impossible to achieve (achieve in the sense of making a full time living from being an actor). The work of acting within traditional forms was so exhausting because of my sensitivity and the uncontainable love I felt for the process. I always related to the character Nina from Chekhov’s play The Seagull. Nina wants to be an actor and is obsessed with her vocation. I love Chekhov. Nina was my dream character to play – a character who wants to be an actor, within a play that contains a play within it.

I think I began focusing on playwriting because it allowed me to still be connected to the things I loved (theatre, dialogue, performance, character) but the intense vulnerability of being in that world could be dulled a little if I wasn’t being the actual performer. I did another degree in writing for performance and during that course I realised how difficult it would be for me to write plays that were like most of the plays seen at the main-stage theatres in Australia. I desperately wanted to be accepted but I also wanted to write plays that were focused on character and dialogue, not narrative. I also became interested in the idea of writing films but it was the same thing, I couldn’t write anything that mirrored a traditional narrative filmmaking structure. My friend Alberto who was doing the playwriting course with me had studied filmmaking and he mentioned to me in passing one day that if I ever wanted to make a film to let him know as he would like to help. As the course ended, I started coming up with some ideas for a film I wanted to make, or rather some characters and world that I wanted to explore on film rather than on stage. I told him about it and he agreed to produce the work that I would write and direct.

It was a years long process and eventually I had made a feature-length video that was not quite narrative, not quite experimental, not quite a film, not quite video art. Thematically, it explored ideas around performing the self and the blurred lines between reality and fiction, facade and authenticity, the awkwardness of navigating relationships and desires and everyday life. I ended up screening it in a gallery space in Melbourne in 2022. I played the film on a loop in the space so the audience could come and go, watch as much of the work as they wanted. I designed the gallery space to sort of reflect the world of the film.

During the process of making that work, I realised that I wanted to be an artist, not an actor or a playwright. I love form and I didn’t want to feel restricted. I wanted to make work that could meander. And I wanted to be able to take more control over my own creations. My work now is still heavily influenced by performance, character, persona. I am always thinking about the ways that people perform different versions of themselves in everyday life and how this can be examined within art. My project now for this MA has a heavy focus on persona, inhabiting roles, surfaces, costumes, visual signifiers of “character”, assigned meaning or judgements or assumptions, outer appearances, images, online performance, fantasy, world-building. I’ve ended up taking part in my own work as a kind of performer, so I am back to acting again but in a new way, a new context.