VALIDACIÓN DE LA SUSCRIPCIÓN

Writing on the subjects of portraiture and diaspora, it is inevitable that the question of “Who?” arises. “Who is the who that is being represented?” asks Richard Brilliant.1 _Brilliant concedes that the very concept of portraiture as a meaningful representation is challenged when the positing of a singular identity existing beyond its social context is denied. In other words, concepts of personal identity that deny the existence of the “personal” and “inner” uniqueness of being (apart from genetic uniqueness) “confound the very concept of the portrait.”2 _{For the artist attempting to portray an individual, according to Brilliant, the} denial of singularity would present an impossible situation. For while “the allegedly irreducible nature of human beings may present a dilemma to philosophers, resolvable only by an extended metaphysical speculation about the ‘beingness’ of the ‘someone’ embodied in the person, let alone secondarily represented by a portrait … portrait artists may not often concern themselves with metaphysics.”3 _{For Brilliant, these philosophical discourses} would make the role of portrait artists, concerned with capturing the uniquely personal, or “personality”, redundant.

Who is the “who” representing the complexities of diasporic identity? Avtar Brah relates a story that demonstrates how representation of identity as non-singular is not confined to philosophy or metaphysical discourse as Brilliant suggests, but occurs in the

1 _{Richard Brilliant, Portraiture, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1991, p. 13.} 2 _{Brilliant, pp. 12-13.}

course of social practice. Brah writes of being interviewed for a scholarship to study in the USA. Born in the Punjab and spending her childhood in Uganda, she was asked by a panel member, “Do you see yourself as African or Indian?” While placing herself within the borders of a recognised, particular identity by answering, “Ugandan of Indian descent”, her unease is clear:

But, of course, he could not see that I could be both. The body in front of him was already inscribed within the gendered social relations of the colonial sandwich. I could not just “be”. I had to name an identity, no matter that this naming rendered invisible all the other identities – of gender, caste, religion, linguistic group, generation.…4

By singling out one identity over other identities that were linked yet categorically distinct, “naming” here paradoxically leads to “anonymity.”

The text below exemplifies again the problematics of the name in the context of diaspora identity. It is an extract from the video titled Accent Elimination, 2005 (Fig. B1) by the New York artist Nina Katchadourian.The following dialogue enactment, scripted by Katchadourian’s mother as a typical conversation in her life, demonstrates the complexities of diaspora and the expectations of locating identity through naming:

SK: Hi, I’m Steena Katchadourian.

NK: Katchadourian…that’s an unusual name. What is it? SK: It’s Armenian.

NK: But you don’t look very Armenian.

SK: Well, I’m actually Finnish. My husband is Armenian. NK: Finnish… So is Steena a Finnish name?

SK: Actually, it’s more of a Swedish name. NK: I see, so you actually have Swedish?

SK: No, I’m Finnish, but I come from a minority group in Finland that speaks Swedish.5

4 _{Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities, Routledge, London and New York, 1996, pp. 2-3..}

5 _{This extract is part of an audio interview with Nina Katchadourian by Sian Prior on ABC Radio National’s program}

Lingua Franca, broadcaston 17 May, 2008, replayed on <http://www.abc.net.au/rn/linguafranca/>, as viewed 22 May, 2008. For a further description of the project Accent Elimination, see Nina Katchadourian’s website, viewed 17 May, 2008 <http://www.ninakatchadourian.com/languagetranslation/accent.php>.

Figure B1

Nina Katchadourian

Accent Elimination, 2005 Video installation.

I can relate my own story to do with naming, this time in the portrait’s representation. Some time into my research, I presented my visual work to a seminar of other creative- based research candidates. After my oral presentation of the portraits I had created, a discussion took place surrounding aspects of my work, such as my use of multiple imagery and the photocopy, and the installation of the work. After a time, a question was asked which seemed at first to be a very simple one to answer, but my reply to which, as I later discovered, would intervene in and complicate the viewing experience of the group: “Who are these people?”

What did that question mean? What are the names of these people? What are their stories? I had introduced my portraits by identifying the subjects as “mother-daughter”, “mother- son”, and “father-daughter”, but the question was not Who are your subjects? but Who are the people behind your images? None of my portraits were identified by proper names in reference to the people whose images we were seeing. Despite having discussed the reasoning behind the use of anonymity in my portraits, the expectation by the viewer in this case was that naming would fix and reveal more about the identity portrayed. As the art historian Catherine Soussloff notes, the expectation of the genre of portraiture is a given: to recognise. In my example, the viewer’s attempt to recognise was through language, or narrative, through the naming.6

When Sandy Nairne describes portraiture as “the conscious depiction of particular individuals” he is able to include concepts of anonymity within that definition, albeit under the terms of specificity. In other words, for Nairne, the portrayal of a particularised person who is anonymous in name can still be legitimately called a portrait as opposed to a generic human image. In fact, Nairne categorises the anonymous portrait as a genre in itself,

6 _{Catherine M Soussloff, The Subject in Art: Portraiture and the Birth of the Modern, Duke University Press, Durham and}

referring to the prevalence of portraits of anonymity, of unknown yet particular individuals, as portrayals that are symbolic of contemporary human experience.7

However, I propose that anonymity in the portrait can be used not only as a metaphor for human experience, but as a means by which a portrayal can be experienced. Catherine Soussloff makes the point that René Magritte’s paintings, in which text and image are mismatched, do not preclude us from recognising the objects denoted. Likewise, she argues, our recognition of the subject in portraiture is not to do with its identity but with our subjectivity. Recognition is found in the relationship between our own subjectivity and the image; it “depends on us putting our own subjectivity into a direct and continuing, insofar as these material objects exist in historical time, relationship with the image depicted.”8