Imaging Our Selves In The '90s

Imagining Our Selves in the '90s 

by Loralei R. Byatt 

I have been making self-portraits for years.

To make them I primarily use photography but also work in mixed media, video and installation, using the medium which expresses my thoughts best. When photographing myself, I usually hold the camera and point it at my face. I use a cheap plastic camera because I like the abstraction caused by the plastic lens.

When I began making photographic art, I rarely photographed myself. My early images were often of small isolated objects found in empty fields. Then I realized that these were metaphors for myself. I began the integration of self with subject matter by making double-exposures of my face with objects. The first one was made in 1988; I have been making self-portraits ever since.

I made a series of double-exposures from 1988 to 1992. The next series, "Communication Skills," was completed in 1993. It was a natural next step; rather than sandwiching objects with my face on film, I have applied actual objects over 4' x4' photographs of my face. Here the objects are metaphors for the difficulties which arise in communication. The viewer must try to get past the objects to see the photograph behind it (the same photograph is used in all pieces). Only parts of it can be seen and even after seeing all four the whole image can only be imagined. The face-to-face communication is obstructed.

Since 1994 I have been working on a series called "Faces of Woman" in which I suggest role playing and raise gender issues by adding various props to my face and then photographing myself. The images are bold and large, 30" x 30." So far I have completed seven images of this ongoing and, as yet, unfinished series. Also in 1994 I finished two mixed media pieces which included images of my face or body and this year exhibited a video installation also concerning the self.

Recently my work has been almost exclusively self-portraits. Why this turn inward? What is this need and fascination with seeing the self? A simplif ied explanation would be that l've gone through a divorce and with it life-changes - living alone, trying to support myself - and my art examines it. That is certainly true. I do self-portraits to understand how I interface with society.

But I believe that there is much more to it. This is not just a personal quest, but something happening on a much greater scale. Artists everywhere are increasingly making self-portraits or other body images. These often depict faceless or fragmented bodies - limbs, internal organs, bodily fluids. Surrogate figures such as dolls and other toy figures, cartoons, and images from television and other media, are often used. Exhibits such as "de-Persona" at The Oakland Museum in 1991, "Corporal Politics" at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in 1992, and "Corpus Mutilatio" at Urban Park in Detroit in 1993 are addressing this type of imaging.

What is happening on a world, or at least Western, scale to cause an evident shift in the subject matter of art? Helaine Posner, writing about "Corporal Politics," feels that it is "difficult for the individual to maintain a coherent identity and integrated sense of self while under attack"- these attacks being contemporary concerns of "sexism, sexual identity, reproductive rights, homophobia, social inequity, brutality, disease, and death."

Paul Tomidy, writing about "de-Persona," suggests that television's "instant communication and dizzying plentitude of choice" as a cause for our "fractured realities." But television would be just one contributing factor in a whole society that has become increasingly segmented, as described by Yi-Fu Tuan in "Segmented Worlds and Self: "When turned inward, the self loses its unreflexive integrity, becomes fragmented and self conscious."

As the West became more civilized a separation between humans and the world they lived in occurred. It became something "out there" which could now be viewed subjectively and the self became something inside which could be analyzed and supposedly changed. Self-analysis became a valued avocation even though it could cause further segmentation.

And the world was becoming a sum of parts. Countries were broken into cities, cities into blocks; even homes were becoming a collection of many little rooms. Mobility increased and families were broken up. Communal cohesion weakened and isolation occurred. People play many roles which seem to have no connection even though one body performs them.

In speaking about a renewed interest in portraiture, Marcia Tucker, the director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, says, "It's a question of the individual body in dialogue, or in confrontation, with the body politic. It's a way of being really honest and of signifying an interface between the self and the world."

Using my self-portraits I am attempting reintegration, and with the double-exposures, actual fusion. I am trying to figure out how I relate to what is outside myself- he world, family, the opposite sex. In doing so, I hope that I also build a more universal expression of experience.

Art expresses the world to which it belongs. The caveman drew the hunt on his wall, artists of the Middle Ages painted for the church, and artists in the '90s show very modern concerns. Self images reflect the Western belief in the power and value of the individual; body fragments are metaphors for fractured selves and a segmented society. ■

How did the arts get taken from the people?

Why do so few seem to possess the thinking process necessary to create art?

Why are so many people so separate from this process?

What is the thinking process we use to create art; why does it seem so unusual?

Does everyone possess this capacity; does suppressing this capacity create mental illness?

If everyone could create art, would you still want to?

If everyone developed this capacity would being an artist cease to be a career?

Do you prefer that creating art be an exclusive activity?

Would art cease to be a marketable commodity if everyone possessed and developed the capacity to create it?

Would life then become the only true art form?

Does art need to be seen to have value?

If everyone developed this capacity to create art, would we be better able to find solutions to the problems our world culture faces?

If everyone developed this thinking capacity, would our world culture face so many problems?

Text: Barbara Neri Photo: Ralph Neri O1994 KHOROS, Inc.