Plaque portrait

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Revision as of 21:13, 7 December 2010 by Boaznruth12 (Talk | contribs) (Iconography and disjuncture: Between the portrait and the photography)

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Definition: Plaque[1]

–noun

  • 1. A thin, flat plate or tablet of metal, porcelain, etc., intended for ornament, as on a wall, or set in a piece of furniture.
  • 2. An inscribed commemorative tablet, usually of metal placed on a building, monument, or the like.
  • 3. A platelike brooch or ornament, esp. one worn as the badge of an honorary order.

(Cited, plaque. (n.d.). Dictionary.com Unabridged. Retrieved December 04, 2010)

The Aesthetic of Portrait

From the perspective of psychoanalysis, Lacan’s theory takes a place on the most far-reaching theories: “The mirror stage.” Before beginning with the briefly illustration of Lacan’s theory, the first thing is how people construct themselves in cognition and how to illustrate ‘the self’ and ‘the other’ to be specific the subjectivity and objectivity. The most far-reaching theory in psychoanalysis – which is the mirror stage – is about the formation: “the forming of and I, of an identity.” (Gallop, 1983:119)

According to Gallop (1983), “the mirror stage is a turning point. After the subject’s relation to himself is always mediated through a totalizing, unified concept – a division between an inside and an outside – there is no ‘self’ before the mirror stage.”(120-121) In this notes, Gallop asserts “It is a turning point in chronology of a self, but it is also the origin, the moment of constitution of that self.” (121)

In addition, the moment of formation itself is one of the constituent foundations to build up the development of portrait. Moreover, the mirror stage would be the first moment to realize self and the other and promotes the first historical sketch on the portrait.

Iconography and disjuncture: Between the portrait and the photography

As the moment of formation of itself, the way of iconography gets a various ways to illustrate either being seen, or seeing. Before advancing the photography, the portrait has an authority not only to encode figurative images but also make an archive. “Hence Iconography, as a term approximately parallel to bibliography, means the gathering of images or representations which show some stated subject or person or place or symbol, so that the subject may be studied in the light of various ways in which it has been recorded by artist and photographers.” (Vanderbilt, 1958:107) From the point of iconographical view, it would be a homogeneous character between the photography and the portrait. On the other hand, the way of encoding process is one of the most different ways. First of all, Richter reasserts Adorno’s definition about the self - portrait below: “While Adorno’s self-portrait is, in both versions, also about the very process of being looked at -caught – in the act of self-portraiture, the second version makes the dimension of spectatorship more explicit.” (Richter, 2002: 5) If so, the characteristics of the photograph would be briefly defined as below: “The Photograph is “the advent of me and as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity,” then the “madness of photography” can be said to have “transformed subject into object, and even, one might say, into a museum object.”(Richter, 2002:-3) How do we recognize ourselves? And also how could we trace the way of representation? What is the beginning of the iconography of portrait as the way of representation? Derrida asserts “the portrait captures the eyes, meaning the gaze, meaning that far which, among other things, photography exists. We assume of the gaze that it is what the subject itself cannot see in its life. If you look at yourself in a mirror, you see yourself either seeing or being seen, but never both at once.” (Richter, 2002:3) As mentioned above, the portrait is considered as the archive of representation. Moreover, the portrait may emphasis any point of view from the subject that being seen and then it has own authenticity which is not to simply duplicate portraits as many as it could without any technical aids. In this sense, here is the most outstanding feature of the portrait. “It is no accident that the portrait was the focal point of early photography (my emphasis). The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture. For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face. This is what constitutes their melancholy, incomparable beauty.” (Benjamin, 1935: 226) Among, whole discourses around the portrait, the questions of authority and authenticity come up.