At the risk of sounding belated: I cannot but think of portraiture in terms of physiognomy. Anyone who has studied the eighteenth century knows of Johann Kaspar Lavater and his science of physiognomics, which examines facial features to read the mind of an individual. The affirmation of physiognomic ideas has become, I am afraid, a suspect business, not least because of their distortion and ideological misuse in the context of “criminal anthropology” and anti-Semitic theory. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why contemporary portraiture has such an ambiguous relation to representations of the face. To name just three examples in which the stability and meaningfulness of the face is willfully, even perversely negated: Andy Warhol’s Most Wanted Men No. 12 shows us a mug shot of a Frank B. who has been reduced to a system of dots on a silk screen; Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s portrait of the Nazi leader Klaus Barbie is a puzzle, literally: an assemblage of “facial units,” Barbie’s features would have long collapsed had they not been shrink-wrapped onto a cardboard; in Cindy Sherman’s History Portraits, it is the excess of face that effectively functions to efface the fantasy of a transparent self. But more disturbing than the experience of flat or repressed faces is the overwhelming presence of physiognomy when it comes to representations of pain. Doris Salcedo’s deformed and broken chairs stand for human bodies and, by extension, minds that were invaded in paranoid search for hidden substance. Here physiognomic or expressive sur-face is no longer understood to come from within but to be the result of an intrusive force from without.
One way or another, all these (sur)faces negate or question our desire for an authentic, “deep” portrait – whatever that might be. They are sardonic reminders of the remoteness of “truth” and the impossibility of ever knowing the mind of another; but they also prompt us to reconsider the ethics of physiognomy. To begin with, Lavater’s theory of physiognomics was not conceived as a fast or, for that matter, invasive science; on the contrary, having deep respect for the privacy of mind, Lavater sought to develop a medium that would generate a new and more attentive social culture predicated on the careful study of surfaces. With his work, he hoped to contribute to human understanding and harmony. Lavater’s deep-seated idealism is inscribed in the programmatic title of his well-known study: Essays on Physiognomy, designed to promote the knowledge and the love of mankind (1789-98). Hence, physiognomy is not an a priori, but a process we need to begin in our own minds. It is only in attending to others and, more generally, our “outside” that meaning can emerge. Even the flattest and most solid of (sur)faces has a physiognomy which we activate by close engagement.
If there is a portrait that represents this idea of active reading, we can find it in Roni Horn’s Asphere VIII. Made of solid steel, Asphere VIII is a round object that was made to inhabit the space we are least conscious of even as we continuously touch it: the ground. As a portrait it embodies at once beholder and beheld, an attentive, monadic mind and a living surface that is reflective of the physiognomy of others.
