'I'

By MARK COUSINS, PORTFOLIO MAGAZINE 30
13 November 1999

The trouble, which these images cause, is not caused by the disability which they represent. The trouble is caused by an entire tradition, which governs not only our vision, but also our thought. Nothing is thought to be more noble and more admirable than the way in which, from antiquity and massively reinforced by Christianity, we inherit a philosophical trinity of the Beautiful, the Good and the True. After two hundred years of critical thought, in which this trinity has been questioned, it still remains a stubborn prejudice that these categories belong together, that Beauty is Truth, and that together they must also signify what is Good. Even to question the trinity is to place oneself outside what is revealed by culture. But there is worse. The insidious effect of this trinity is that it also dominates in a philosophical tyranny, the way in which we group the negative of these terms. In this perspective, we already know what is ugly; it is the opposite of Beauty. We already know what error is; it is the opposite of Truth. We already know what evil is; it is the opposite of Good. And there is still worse. If the positive terms Beauty, the Good and the True are welded together as a single figure, so too is their opposite. The Ugly is a kind of error and is an evil. Error is a mistake and is ugly and is an evil. Evil is what is ugly and is an error, or a heresy. This veritable philosophical complex of Truth, Beauty and the Good, which still recommends itself to many, has as its secret malice, the authorisation of exclusion. It is a complex, which not only permits but which positively produces the theoretical basis for persecution and stigmatisation.

If one were to wonder under what theoretical conditions this complex is possible, the real enemy presents itself as the concept of totality. This might seem to be a rather abstract concept to bear any responsibility for all that violence of idealisation itself. The criminalisation of error, the disgust at singularity, the rejection of contingency, the whole metaphysical will to exclusion - all these can be found behind the still respectable façade of the category of the totality.

The images here work through some of these issues with patience and resolution. In some sense they come out the other side. After a while it is not the images of disability which disturb, but two quite different elements. The first is the repetition of the head and face. On the one hand the face seems constant in its image of a totality, a set of symmetries of eyes and other features. Yet its character exists in the small asymmetries, the deductions from a totality that leave perception room to question it. The second condition is the interior within which the figure is posed. Suddenly the furniture, the patterns on the carpet, the architectural details all manifest an almost manic determination to register every kind of possible symmetry. Yet we can also see that it is the concept of the totality, the romance of wholeness which is what underpins Beauty, Truth and the Good. Each of them in a way are facets of the concept of the totality. Beauty has always been defined as a totality, as a whole, a completeness. Truth must be a totality in order to represent what is real; it must not be partial. The Good is a completed act; in a good world, an evil act is incomplete, is a mistake. The malign role of the concept of the totality becomes brutally clear. The ugly fails to achieve the totality. It rears away from form to what is no longer form, something too individual, too singular, too close to materiality, too far from idealisation.

In this tyrannical complex we can discern a whole history in which a theoretical situation has always been available, not just for the philosophical idealisation of certain forms, but for a violent denunciation of its negative. Indeed in it we begin to discern the symmetry, repetition, harmony, as though it were taken up with the task of repressing something. As though the interiors proliferated form, as though no substance should be left unworked by form, lest some disorganisation of 'stuff' should make its presence felt. It is clear that in a distant fashion these heavy, pompous interiors still bear the marks of that very philosophical tradition which is rooted in a violent stigmatising gesture. It is a tradition which we cannot fully 'think' 'our self out of, for it is also a question of what is built and what is designed. The images begin the task of undoing the settings.

We begin to understand something more in the way which the portraits are unsettled. In so far as these images play through a number of conventions of portraits those conventions become objects of interpretation. We begin to understand the orthopaedic character of the settings of the portraits. These settings are often, and reasonably, understood as being expressive. They express the sitters' status, wealth, and the space of the sitter. Or they express something of the character or mood of the sitter. But here we see exposed a more complex relation between sitter, site and spectator. The setting, here the proliferation of architectural motifs of harmony and symmetry, acts as a point of identification for the spectator. It is as if the logic of all that articulated detail is devoted to making us, the spectators, mirror images of the scene, organised and regularised. It is a setting which would prepare us for a figure who would present a form which itself mirrored both the setting and the way in which the spectator had been ordered to see. It is only because in these images that the figure resists the unspoken complicity, that we glimpse the structure of the relation of figure, setting and spectator in the portrait. The figure's disability interrupts the normal but unnoticed relations.

In a way this has something to say about access. Obviously it is not to reveal something about access in the conventional sense; it is more about exclusion. Let us say that the portrait as a genre is at least partly governed by the unity of the Good, the Beautiful and the True. Beyond the question of the tendency to flatter the sitter, the very function of the portrait is to link the individual to more general qualities, to 'bring them out'. The portrait is then not just of someone, it needs someone. It needs a particular type of spectator, one who repeats the same idealisation of the body that the setting has demanded. In this sense we have all experienced a sense of exclusion from certain images. It is not so much that we simply dislike an image, but that we can sense that this or that image does not want us. In extreme cases we can feel excluded or disliked by an image. The mechanism of this strange process can be described in terms of our unwillingness or our incapacity to identify with the body which the image demands that we present to it. Normally this process is unconscious, but by disrupting the process here, these images begin to show us the nature and power of that process.

It is a process which puts the spectator in the wrong. The image judges the spectator and finds him or her lacking. This shows that the trinity of the Good, the True and the Beautiful is also a tribunal which sits in perpetual session, admitting some and excluding others. Access to an image is not the same as access by an image. It might seem an odd undertaking, but one might propose not a history of people's taste in images, but a history of images' taste in people. It would trace a strange looking glass world, in which images bought and sold people, in which they hotly debated the decline of people in general, in which annual prizes were awarded to the most suitable spectators. It would tell the great orthopaedic story of how people were remodelled so that they made possible spectators. It would tell who was excluded from the presence of images. It would ask what was it that images feared.