Portrait of the Artist as a Home Page, 2001 (USA)

What one must note is that portraiture, of whatever kind, pictorial or literary, aims simultaneously to represent and to underline or reveal the (physical and/or moral) traits of a particular person, as he or she appears to the gaze of another (even if this is the person him- or herself, in the case of a self-portrait, which still requires a certain detachment, a doubling of the personality between the observer and the observed). Thus, portraiture as a genre requires three steps: individualization (of a person, as "unique," even when meant to illustrate a human or social "type"), mediation (through the gaze of another, that is, of an artist or an author and, through him, of a society), and representation (the portrait, as such, capable of being realistic or idealistic, merciless or flattering, poetic, expressionistic, etc.). It is from this come-and-go, this tension sometimes, between the representation of a person in his private aspects and in his public persona, between the representation of his exteriority and the revelation of his interiority, that the singularity and value of portraiture is derived.

With the advent of modern society and mass culture, however, this value has become problematic. As democracy is introduced, as individualism becomes exacerbated, and as new media (beginning with photography in the 19th century) and modern communication methods enable the reproduction and large-scale dissemination of each and everyone's persona, both the portrait and the person paradoxically lose some of their uniqueness, their individual and individualizing value. In visual art, Pop Art has expressed this evolution and new tension very well, with, among others, Andy Warhol's portrait series, where a well-know face, unique and recognizable from all others, ends up, when endlessly reproduced by the artist, falling into the anonymity of commodities and the marketable object.

The Internet introduces a new element to contemporary social relationships. Not only does it offer everyone (at least in theory) the means of publishing (whether information or misinformation), of engaging in exchanges, etc., it also makes it possible to broadcast oneself, so to speak, and in doing so to possibly counteract the slippage into self-dispossession and anonymity caused by mass-culture: hence the phenomenon of "home pages" (the French term, "pages personnelles," is still more revealing). The home page is a (self-)portrait created for the Web, (most) often produced with touching amateurism and generally consisting of one or several pictures of the individual presenting himself and more or less detailed personal information (name, nickname or pseudonym, occupation, hobbies, etc). Often, home pages will resemble if not be identical to dating-agency-type personals. They always have the more or less admitted aim of eliciting some response or exchange (they always have an e-mail address). More profoundly, however, they correspond to an affirmation of existence and fulfill a need for individualization.

Here is where artist Nino Rodriguez comes on the scene with his Web work entitled Portrait of the Artist as a Home Page. On first sight, this work seems like a biting, ironic commentary on this new form of self-representation that may well represent another step in the pursuit of "fifteen minutes of celebrity," which Andy Warhol prophesied for all and deemed typical of the modern era. But Rodriguez presents this work anonymously: a first paradox, indicative of their being much more to the work than mere parody. Its title immediately awakens references, first in art history, alluding to the "mythological portrait" sub-genre common in Renaissance and Classical art2, and then in twentieth-century literature - one thinks both of James Joyce (Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916) and Dylan Thomas (Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, 1940).

The operative term in the title of all these works is "as," which shows the artist to have attempted to disguise or transform the subject (or himself) into "another" in order to reveal its (his) personality, in whole or in part. However, the works of Joyce, Thomas, and Rodriguez as well, are typical of the twentieth century, in that their "mythological" (self-)portraits no longer present identifiable mythological characters, but are embodied (or disembodied) in common nouns ("young man," "young dog," "home page") that proliferate their images and render them more complex, while also attempting to counter romanticism by trivializing the artist's persona, making it more anonymous in so doing.

Rodriguez' work presents itself as a maze in which the visitor gets lost, navigating from one photo-portrait to another, all taken from existing home pages. Although accompanied by the name (or nickname) of whomever they represent, with a phrase or citation also taken from their home page, the accumulation and repetition of the commonplace soon renders these pictures anonymous. One finally notices that all these pages represent someone who, although different every time, is always male and always named or nicknamed Nino. Even if one is not supposed to know the artist's "real" name, in the end one can't help wondering if he has not "slipped" into the crowd himself (he has, in fact). More importantly, this proliferation of Ninos has the effect of both fictionalizing them and unifying them, as much as is possible, into a single character, at once multiple and moving, whose identity is always shifting and uncertain, in a representation at once ironical and touching of homo contemporaneus. It's not so much that the artist appropriates the identity of others; rather, he puts himself back in a series in which he finally disappears: irony, modesty, a taste for play and masks, but also the latest step in the process of dissolution of individual identity - for the artist, as for any another - in the crowd and mass culture, and in the serialization of art and problematization of portraiture already begun with Pop Art. A "self-portrait" made up of others' portraits becomes a non-portrait, an anti-portrait, on which the artist can no longer sign his name.

Anne-Marie Boisvert

2- By way of example, I mention only, for the sixteenth century, the sculpture (and many portraits) of the Fontainebleau school representing Diane de Poitiers, for instance, as the huntress Diana, or, in the eighteenth, Nattier's portrait of the Duchesse de Chartres as Hebe. The traditional mythological portrait has all but vanished; one may nevertheless recall Adolf Hitler's portrait as a Medieval knight, produced in the twentieth century under the Nazi regime!