Artists began using photographs as reference for painted portraits or sculptures almost immediately upon the discovery of the photographic process in the 19th century. However, it takes skill to translate the reference image into another medium so that it looks “real”—in other words, not like a reproduction of a reproduction, but like the person it was meant to represent. Tricky stuff.
In my just-completed MFA thesis about personal memorial objects, I spent a fair amount of time and grammar considering memorial portrait tattoos. They fascinate me on a number of levels, most notably that when the tattooist winds up his or her work and puts down the needle, very often the finished artwork does not look like the person it was intended to memorialize. It looks like a picture of the person: not the same thing. Despite our willingness to completely trust an image once conjured as if by magic from light and chemistry, and now made up of pixels, pictures lie and they always have. They capture a fleeting and completely uncharacteristic expression in that 1/1000 of a second shutter snap; the image distorts your face or your body. Sometimes you look better, sometimes worse. Photoshop, obviously, gives us even more and better ways to create a narrative/tell a lie, take your pick.
All of this was on my mind as I gazed at these portraits of past United Nations Presidents, on display at the U.N. Secretariat. Like a typical New Yorker, I have never been to most of the city’s tourist spots. (I visited the statue of Liberty for the first, and probably last, time a year ago, and then only because it was for a grad school assignment.) But some friends from San Francisco were in town for a few days this June; they called to say their 12-year-old son would love an architectural tour of the city, and would I mind taking him a few places?
The U.N. was on his list, and after passing through scary airport-level security—take off your jewelry and belt, X-ray your bags and yourself, no liquids allowed inside—we found ourselves in the very depressing, dilapidated and airport-like lobby of the Secretariat. The building has serious issues involving asbestos, lead paint, and structural problems requiring an estimated $1 billion to repair; but apparently no countries pay their U.N. dues and so things are quietly falling apart in the meantime. Access to every area but the lobby is restricted, so we consoled ourselves by looking at the art on exhibit. P.J. said to me, “This looks like a middle-school science fair!” He had a point; most of the art was amateurish, and the set up on movable display boards, accompanied by too much earnest text, didn’t help.
From a distance, the row of U.N. presidential portraits was unremarkable, just tight renderings obviously based on photos, but as we got closer something about their texture seemed off; too matte and lumpy for paintings. Close inspection revealed that they were finely hand-knotted rugs, a gift from Iran to the U.N. It didn’t make them any better as artwork, but it reminded me once again of how much art in all mediums has come to rely upon photographs as a starting point, and how the results can be startling, but not always in a good way.
Tags: Art, New York City, Photography