In trying to find today the exhibit of retratos at the Smithsonian up and down stairs, past fountains, and through little nooks and rooms of statues and jewelry we ran into others similarly lost: when we all together finally found the exhibit we were like the Katamari Damarcy ball rolling on in, legs and arms hats and scarves unfurling into collective murmur at the color and life on the walls.
So, like, for me, when it comes to portraits, painting beats out photography just about every time. I will be William Morris's great-great-niece, listing after craft and handwork.
The effort of hands trying to record a face, present in any painting, means that someone was thinking and making choices about what mattered about a face (which a portrait photographer certainly does) but then also making what mattered have the presence of paint. You have to decide what of eyes and nose and eyebrows and pinched lips should have most emphasis, and what color, and what color relative to the other pieces, and how to make it all work together? I like the paintings where you can see the paint slicked on, where the mouth isn't a flat red round but is built instead of quick and brushstrokes. You can see someone's hands in there, moving, pushing. The face that results belongs therefore to at least two people, to the painter and to the model -- as well as to whatever tastes and agreements, arguments, beliefs, varnish, and distrust passed between and around them while they faced each other.
And that's what made the paintings in this exhibit even hotter, the breathable tensions between the Latin and the American. The exhibit was laid out chronologically, and so first there are the portraits -- the little sculptures that can travel -- from the Olmec, the Maya, and the Moche, and then there's the overlay of the European culture that erases the little clay works from having the status of art, replacing them with tall stiff men in uniforms and women buried in lace; but then eventually -- by the nineteenth century -- the life of the little clays can't be pretended away anymore and it starts erupting through the European habits of painted portrait. The colors become hotter, and the painted nuns are delirious in their weddings and deaths, flowers sloughing around them and bloody emblems of saints on their chests; the nuns close their eyes a little but still focus directly and with a little reproach on whoever is looking. There's a priest in sunglasses and black cap from 1853 who looks mean, fleshy, and curious. There's a woman clutching a bunch of roses who looks like she should have a pack of cigarettes also, to share, her face a little falling away from the bone and the stark dark background. There's a man who saved others from a shipwreck, his face resistant to exuberance but unerasable. And, of course, there's a Frida Kahlo painting that could fly away on her twitching eyebrows.
The devaluation of handwork that started in the late eighteenth century has not been about just farm and other mechanical labor; it is only in the last fifteen years or so that painting has been allowed to be representational again in the judgments of the fast grabby New York scene, that the efforts of the learned craft of drawing have not been put down in favor of concept, video, and performance/installation. I am not -- could not be -- arguing that concept, video, performance, installation, and the digital are worse or better than representational painting. They all do different work; they have their own contexts and technological possibilities.
But I want to remember faces, and -- because of them -- the stuff that people do for, with, and against each other. Maybe it is just my education and what I've made on my own time that leans me toward being enthralled with the painted faces of others, but, holy last day of 2005, those paintings peopled those basement rooms and made me smell flesh, loving, lemons, and the intensities of sex and hate. The ride back to the hotel on the Metro was not petals on some black bough; Dennis had to tell me to stop staring and to quiet down the stories I was making up about other lives. It's the hands, I tell you, the hands in the paint. They are around my throat and brain, and it's all good.
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