AHIS10003 Chap.10 Artists as Their Own Models: Gender and Identity
Artists as Their Own Models: Gender and Identity
Week 9 opens by rejecting the assumption most readers bring to a self-portrait. The overview sets itself against the familiar expectation that a self-portrait opens a window onto an inner self: that, it says, is not what these artists were doing: identity is assembled out of images and concepts already in circulation.
Both works are small, neither much bigger than a sheet of paper, and both use the artist as the model without using the artist as the subject. What fills the gap is borrowed material. One painting, oil on metal at 31 by 35 centimetres, is organised around a national and cultural dividing line named in its title.
One photograph, a gelatin silver print at 19.1 by 24.1 centimetres, adopts the conventions and roughly the dimensions of a film publicity still for a film that does not exist.
What this chapter covers
- 01
The thesis: identity assembled rather than revealed
- 02
Two small works, and why intimacy of format matters to a refusal of intimacy
- 03
Titles pulling in opposite directions: maximal specificity against a refusal plus a number
- 04
What each work borrows, and what the borrowing produces
- 05
Oil on metal: a hard, non-absorbent support with a devotional history
- 06
Why borrowed is not a criticism
- 07
A film still as a functional object, and what a work that imitates one keeps
- 08
Untitled, a genre name and a serial index, read as a titling strategy
- 09
Description first: the subject's own neutral account of the photograph
- 10
Where the reading list points, and what it does not license you to assert
- 11
Deciding a divided spelling, and when to disclose a divided record
Making the constructed-identity argument concrete
- 1Establish the medium and format as mimicry: a gelatin silver print of 19.1 by 24.1 centimetres, the medium and roughly the format of a commercial film still.
- 1Use the subject's own neutral description as the evidence base rather than interpreting first.
- 1Show that each element named is a genre convention: costume signals a type, setting signals a situation, framing signals a narrative moment.
- 1Name what is withheld, and what the title and serial number do.
- 1Conclude on what the viewer is actually reading.
Key terms
- Constructed identity
- Identity understood as assembled from images and concepts already in circulation, rather than as an inner self to be disclosed.
- Film still
- A photograph made on or around a film production and used to publicise it: a functional object with no author in the ordinary sense.
- Gelatin silver print
- The standard black-and-white photographic process of the period, and the medium that lets a picture pass as the functional object it imitates.
- Oil on metal
- A hard, non-absorbent support on which paint sits rather than sinks, with a history in small devotional panels.
- Serial titling
- Refusing a descriptive title and adding a number, so that no single image is definitive and identity becomes a series rather than a portrait.
Artists as Their Own Models: Gender and Identity FAQ
If these are self-portraits, why are they not about the artists?
Because the week rejects the self-portrait as a window onto interiority. Both artists use themselves as the model without using themselves as the subject, and what fills the gap is a repertoire of images that already existed: an iconographic tradition in one case, a set of cinematic conventions in the other.
Is the photographic process spelled gelatin or gelatine?
The subject's materials use both, on two official surfaces each. This book uses gelatin silver print. For your own writing, pick one form, use it consistently in every footnote, caption and list entry, and do not spend a sentence of a short essay noting the variance: a variant spelling of a standard process is not an art-historical finding.
When should I disclose that the records disagree?
When it affects the argument. Chapter 6's paper against cardboard went to the heart of a chapter about materiality and had to be disclosed; a spelling variant does not. The rule of thumb is to disclose a divided record when your claim depends on it, and simply decide when it does not.
Why is the support worth a sentence?
Because it is unusual and it is chosen. Oil on metal is an atypical support for a twentieth-century easel painting and a traditional one for small devotional panels. The surface can be brought to a smoothness canvas resists, and in a picture about being positioned between two systems, a support borrowed from a third tradition is not neutral.
Exam move
The single most useful exercise for this week is to take any sentence you write about either work and ask which words could be checked against the object. Words like personal, expressive and revealing will not survive; a dimension, a support, a title's structure and a named convention will. Then practise the week's thesis in reverse: given a work, name the repertoire it is assembled from and say what was done to it.
Note that this week, like week 8, is carried by its overview and reading list rather than by a published lecture notes.
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