As I was preparing to depart from the Pulitzer symposium, Ann Hamilton asked if she could take my portrait. Earlier that day I had seen her with a tray of the tiny pinhole cameras that she uses to take portraits by placing one in her mouth while exposing the film. I was familiar with some of the images from this series, and was captivated by the possibility that I might experience this direct, personal mode of portraiture first-hand. Staring into the camera in Ann’s mouth, and keenly aware of the observing eyes of the other symposium participants, I began to laugh. For a moment I was no longer the serious graduate student there at the Pulitzer to debate the definitions and implications of terms such as “portraiture” and “embodiment;” I was a slightly giddy, camera-shy person having her photograph taken by an artist. I’m sure my laughter, the unsteady movement of my body, turned the ‘portrait’ into an indecipherable blur. However, I imagine that this precarious image—rather than a static likeness—articulates the way in which the subject’s attempt (in this case, mine) to stage herself before the camera is so easily, and unpredictably, transformed by circuit of communication with the artist, as well as the determining context of a specific institutional framework (the Pulitzer.)

The way institutional frameworks define our interpretations of a portrait, and the channels through which such meanings are canonized, served as the focus of the brief presentation that I gave a day earlier, at the opening of the symposium. Drawing particular attention to Koons’ portrait of Louis XIV, the Warhol drawing of Mao Tse-Tung, and Nauman’s cast of his own bound back, I sought to raise some questions about the interface of physical and cultural bodies in relationship to the canonization process, whereby certain artworks become singularly valued, and therefore representative, of an artist’s broader body of work. The body in a portrait is always a composite figure; it is not an accurate portrayal of a singular identity, but congeals numerous, and often abstract, impulses. These might include the hyperbolic desire to visually articulate one’s political sovereignty through style (the Koons riff); to inscribe one’s own body into a historical lineage while simultaneously questioning that genealogy (Nauman); or to exploit an image that is memorable, easily reproducible, and consumable by transforming one type of propaganda into another (Warhol, whose alchemy converts the Communist leader into a icon of capitalism). I found it provocative that the Nauman and the Warhol in this exhibition relate closely to similar works that, at their time of auction, set record prices for each artist. (The unique wax over plaster version of Nauman’s Henry Moore Bound to Fail (Back View) was sold for $9.9 million in 2001; $17.4 million was the price for a Warhol painting of Chairman Mao in 2006). I brought this up not to belabor the point about the power of money and the art market, but to highlight how the framing structures that stabilize a portrait’s intelligibility—be they the historical, economic, or the socio-political—change over time and inflect the way we see both the portrait’s subject and our image of its producer. Have these works have become canonical representations of the artist’s work, and therefore of the artists themselves? Has Warhol’s portrait of Mao become a kind of self-portrait of the artist?