I asked Anne-Marie Smith if she would 'sit' for a portrait. At first she was not keen. My first reaction was I thought that at the time I was being asked out of politeness, that nobody would want to do a portrait of me, so I should refuse politely. And then when I was asked again and then I realised there was some real interest there, I felt a bit scared. I was a bit nervous, quite nervous about being pinned down in one place, in one spot and somebody actually getting hold of me. I was giving some of myself away. (1)(Anne Marie Smith) Is portraiture concerned with mastery, with capturing likeness, with grasping or taking away something of the sitter/subject, or can we conceive of portraiture in some other way? Traditionally portraiture aimed to capture, to pin down, reveal something of the sitter/subject; likeness, character, personality, intelligence, criminality or social and economic status. Within this tradition, the face acts as the marker. The faciality traits - the constellation of the eyes, nose and mouth held within the frame of the face have become synonymous with and indicative of a person's identity. The face is the portrait. Yet, Deleuze and Guattari would argue that the 'face' is not a given. Rather, the face is socially produced. They term this process of social production, facialization. Facialization is not an actual face, not your face or my face, but rather an abstract machine that produces the social subject. The face then, Òis not an innocent moment of representation, but rather announces a particular type of overcoding of a surfaceÓ(Angel, 1997:3). It is the white wall/black hole system of subjection, of normalization. Deleuze and GuattariÕs project is to dismantle the face, lay open the 'relation of the face to the assemblages of power that require (the) social production' of it (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 181). As a moment of representation of the face then, the portrait is doubly implicated. I would argue that the face is a politics and that history of portraiture is the history of the politics of faciality. Robert Nelson, writing in a catalogue essay for the exhibition Faciality, points out, that the 'deconstruction of the face, must begin with a deconstruction of the portrait' (Nelson, 1994:15). He continues: Deconstruction of the face will not deal with noses and eyes per se but with their wilful depictionÓ (Nelson, 1994:15). Deconstruction of the face must begin with unpacking the representational regime which underpins the practice of portraiture. Deleuze and Guattari argue: If the face is a politics, dismantling the face is also a politics involving real becomings, an entire becoming clandestine. Dismantling the face is the same as breaking through the wall of the signifier, getting out of the black hole of subjectivity...Find your black holes and white walls, know them, know your faces; it is the only way you will be able to dismantle them and draw your lines of flight. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987:188) In the twentieth century, the portrait has gone through massive transformations: it has been cut up, abstracted, montaged, elided, distorted, deconstructed, reconstructed, refigured and morphed without any real questions being asked about what it means to make a face. Matisse effaced the face in The Painter and his model (1917) and Picasso fractured the unity of the face in analytical portraits such Ambrose Vollard (1909). The representations might have looked different, profound acts of deterritorialization, but what of the the event of the face-to-face? If the face is a politics, then surely the face-to-face becomes of paramount importance in deconstructing the politics of the portrait. Lucien Freud can take up to a year to complete a portrait, often requiring his subjects to sit for up to eight hours (Gayford 1993:22). Picasso had Gertrude Stein sit for some eighty sessions and then effaced the portrait and the refigured it working from Iberian masks (Buchloch in Feldman, 1994:53) What is it like to sit for eight hours or eighty sessions? In dismantling the face then, the face-to-face exchange between artist and subject/sitter becomes the site for rethinking portraiture. I naively began making portraits of the 'locals' in the Goldfield's town of Kalgoorlie ten years ago. The portraits were made in a single session, depending on how much time my sitter/subject had available. The constraints of time (two to three hours), space (the lounge, an office, a kitchen or a verandah) and location (Kalgoorlie) created an intense and fraught event. I would never know whether I would be able to pull any 'thing' out of the chaos and my sitter/subjects didn't know if anything would come of this labour; whether sense would be made of non/sense, a mass of coloured marks and shapes on a canvas. It was in this context that I asked Anne Marie Smith to sit for me. Q. Could you tell me a little bit about how you felt while you were having your portrait painted? A. That experience was very strong....I was not for a minute concerned...perhaps at first I was a bit self-conscious, but after I felt very close to the painter's effort and that really got me...that was very very strong. I started empathising with the painter... suffering for that person in terms of how much intensity of work she was going through and that really made me forget myself.... I do not even want to feel for myself...but I discovered a whole new thing. There was somebody out there who was actually going through a massive effort to try to capture...ah...it happened to be me.(Anne-Marie Smith) Shifting the focus from the face, to the face to face; from the portrait to the interactive space of making a face, involves a fundamental rethinking of portraiture. Ann-Marie Smith's comments in response to sitting for a portrait, open up a different way of thinking about portraiture. The shift from self consciousness to empathy and suffering, suggest a change in boundary relations between artist and sitter/subject, between the I and the non I. I would propose that it echoes Emmanuel Levinas' ethics of alterity where, as Cathryn Vasseleu suggests there is 'the capacity to put oneself in the other's position' to experience 'another's pain by a process of substitution' and not merely identification (Vasseleu, 1991:144). It surprised me how much I felt for the author...I felt for a moment we shared an experience and I saw that the author was expending some energies in a direction which I was part of and I compared it with my own experiences...Really it was, I felt, quite a painful experience for her and I would say she would have been marked forever, so therefore it is part of her history. (Anne-Marie Smith) In positing the notion of substitution, rather than identification, there is no sense in which Anne-Marie wanted to be in my position. Rather it is a question where, according to Vasseleu, 'vulnerability can be substituted, 'one-for-the-other'...given significance, in place of corporeality which exceeds and bears upon his/her ownÓ (Vasseleu, 1991:144). For Anne-Marie, the intensity of the effort, made her forget about herself and she suggests, 'I did not even want to feel for myself...but I discovered a whole new thing (Anne Marie Smith). I am curious to unravel what is this 'whole new thing' that constitutes the experience of being involved in an act or portrayal. Is it possible that the very process of 'making an identity' produces what Catherine Waldby describes as a 'kind of momentary annihilation or suspension of what normally counts as 'identity',' akin to 'the 'little death' of orgasm' (Waldby, 1995:266). Whilst Waldby is talking specifically about erotic pleasure, I would suggest that portraiture and self portraiture are erotic practices involving the dissolution of boundary between the I and the non-I. The dynamics of boundary dissolution between the I and the non-I, suggestive of the 'little death' of orgasm, can be theorized in terms of dynamic systems and in particular via Deleuze and Guattari's notions of molarity and molecularity. Identity, according to Deleuze and Guattari is a molarity, but as Estelle Barrett points out molar systems are Òin a constant motion between one state or degree of molarity and another' (Barrett, 1996:99). In the process of movement or transformation, the molar system becomes molecularized. This suspension or annihilation of identity is what constitutes becoming. In that phase, the ÔboundaryÕ or molarity becomes increasingly agitated (as in the heating of ice or water) and loses its coherence as a molar structure. It becomes molecularized. The constant ÔfluxÕ created in the movement between states of molarity can be applied to identity in a way that brings into question 'being'. As Barrett points out, such an account Òmoves us away from the notion of the subject as 'being' to one of the subject in a perpetual process of becomingÓ (Barrett, 1996:103). The event of the portrait can be seen to articulate the dynamics of becoming, as two molarities undergo an intense transformation, take a line of flight and become deterritorialized (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987:283). Deleuze and Guattari use the term haecceity to describe such phases of 'dynamic interactive intensity' (Barrett, 1996:104). For them: between substantial forms and determined subjects, between the two, there is not only a whole operation of demonic local transports but a natural play of haecceities, degrees, intensities, events and accidents that compose individuations totally different from those of the well-formed subjects that receive them. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987:253) The analogy of magnetic fields may provide a useful way of visualizing the phase of haecceity as it pertains to the artist and sitter/subject exchange. A movement in one field creates effects in the field of the other. The interplay between the 'force fields' within and between molarities creates pulsions, the rhythm and beat of the body. Rosalind Krauss proposes that the pulsions, rhythms and beat of the body have the power to 'decompose and dissolve the very coherence of forms' (Krauss, 1988:51). In other words there is a qualitative transformation which involves the restructuring of the 'I' itself (Lotman,1990:22). I would propose that the event of portraiture is a state of working hot, a flux which can transform and restructure both artist and sitter (3). It produces a zone of free play before a representation coalesces. In this, there is the tension of indeterminacy whereby identity may only come as a 'glimpse' before it either freezes into a molarity or is forever lost. At its most dynamic, the act of portrayal produces the dissolution of forms. In order to make a face, one has to unmake self. Whether this dissolution or decomposition actually occurs and whether the pulse resonates through the portrait is another question. Francis Bacon asks, 'how can this thing be made so that you catch the mystery of appearance within the mystery of the making?' (Sylvester, 1987:105) He continues: One hopes one will be able to suddenly make the thing there in a totally illogical way but that it will be totally real, and in the case of a portrait, recognizable as the person. (Sylvester, 1987:105) The total ÔrealnessÕ that Bacon talks about, is the operation of the pulse, the heat of desire which Rosalind Krauss suggests 'makes and loses its object in one and the same gesture' (Krauss, 1988:62). In a work of art, this process is termed the operation of the figural. In the act of portrayal, I would suggest that it is this pulsation between artist and subject/sitters which threatens to dissolve altogether the boundaries between subjects. The play with boundaries and boundary dissolution in portraiture is a dangerous activity. For Anne-Marie, there was the danger of being pinned down in one place, in one spot and somebody actually getting hold of her. She was fearful that I would take some part of her away. The belief that some trace of her could be taken and transferred into the portrait; that she would somehow be in the portrait, suggests that for Anne-Marie, an image does not just stand in or represent her. The portrait comes to embody her being in some way. It could be said that it is an act in which language 'transcends' its own structures and 'enacts the 'mutual reflection' of body and language' (Deleuze in Chisholm 1995:25). If this is the case, and it is in many cultural contexts, the portrait is not just a sign, not just a representation of the person, but actually becomes them. As Lucien Freud observed to Laurence Gowing: I would wish my portraits to be of people, not like them. Not having the look of the sitter, being them. (Freud quoted in Gayford 1993:22) Seen from this point of view, the risks are high and the artist has a fundamental duty of care to the subject-sitter. It may be argued in fact, that the portrait is the face-to-face par excellence that informs Emmanuel LevinasÕ ethics of alterity. The coming face-to-face is for Levinas is a situation of responsibility. As John Llewelyn remarks, 'the burden of being is doubled by the burden of responsibility for the other' (Llewlyn 1995:65). It is not surprising then, that the making of a portrait is an exchange so painful as to be able to 'mark' a person's life, to 'become part of one's history' (Anne Marie Smith in interview with Estelle Barrett 1990). In this exchange, Llewelyn suggests: However 'glorious' the responsibility for the other in the recto-verso of the face-to-face may be...the wonder remains a wounding, the thauma a trauma. (Llewelyn, 1995:64) Emmanuel Levinas's work on the face-to-face relation begins with the ethical relation of the I and non I. In a philosophical field where discussions of being commence with the cogito, with the I, Levinas attempts to rethink relations in terms of alterity. I am responsible for the other. Within the face-to-face, Levinas decentres the position of the I. He posits the relation with the other as one of proximity which, according to Kathryn Vasseleu conveys: exposure to alterity which occurs before the subject can gather it self into a position in relation to this alterity. It is an openness prior to, or the condition of presence or contact. Proximity operates within the metaphor of touch, or as an unmediated contiguity between two bodies. (Vasseleu, 1991:145) To invoke notions of proximity and touch, suggest that the relationship of artist and sitter/subject is one of touching or being-in-touch. This incarnation of intersubjectivity finds a form in Bracha Lichtenberg EttingerÕs theorisation of the matrixial and co-emergence. Framed within the relation between mother and child in the late intra-uterine phase of pregnancy, Lichtenberg Ettinger posits a relationship between the I and non I that is based on contiguity, of distance-in-proximity. For her, subjectivity is seen as a co-emergent, as Òan encounter of co-emerging elements through metramorphosisÓ(Lichtenberg Ettinger, 1996:125). As Maurice Merleau Ponty observes, 'the mother opens the child to circuits' (Merleau Ponty in Banting, 1992;232). The notions of co-emergence, distances in proximity and contiguity suggest the sense of touch and kinesthetics and work against the modernist privileging of sight. As Levinas suggests: to be in contact is neither to invest the other or annul his alterity, nor suppress myself in the other. In contact itself the touching and the touched separate, as though the touch moved off, was always already other, did not have anything in common with me. (Levinas quoted in Vasseleu, 1991:145) In LevinasÕ face-to-face encounter and in Lichtenberg EttingerÕs differentiation in co-emergence, there is a sense of the 'I' being not armed, not in position, not fixed or focussed. It is that state Òbefore the subject can gather itself into a position in relation to this alterityÓ (Vasseleu, 1991:145). When I come face-to-face with another there is a movement between us there is displacement, heat and friction. Levinas would go further. For him in the face-to-face relation, interiority becomes exteriority (Llewlyn, 1995:65), a turning inside out. It is where the inside is revealed where I am presented in all my nakedness. As a model of difference that speaks of contiguity without incorporation I would propose the double knot. Formed from two slip knots, the double knot comes back on itself; the self is 'touched' by the inside and outside of the other, rubs fully against the other, but when pulled apart separates. Being able to bring two different surfaces together, the double knot maintains the separateness of each yet creates an intense encounter between elements. The seductiveness of this model lies with its ability to articulate the face-to-face encounter as theorised by Levinas and suggest a way forward in the face-to-face encounter between artist and sitter/subject. In the turning inside out and contact between two surfaces there is brulure (Llewlyn, 1995:65) the intense heat/light of the glare. The face-to-face encounter is a frottage, a heated encounter produced through the rubbing together of two different surfaces. The bringing together of two surfaces in the metramorphic moment is excessive. As surface rubs against surface, each is revealed in its absolute nudity (Levinas in Llewelyn, 1995:63). This rubbing or frottage produces heat, increasing the molecular activity to the point where the molar structure is broken up, destratified. The face as a sign is pulverised in the encounter. The heightened state of activity, the molecularization that occurs in the face-to-face encounter is what allows the borderline to become threshold since it liquefies the boundary and undoes the face. Levinas would describe this process as the de-fection of identity where there is: a falling away from and unmaking of identity which is nevertheless not the identity's death. (Llewelyn, 1995:66) This de-fection of identity allows the creation of borderlinks between elements, between the I and the non-I. It creates the intensity of metramorphosis which, according to Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, is 'the becoming borderline of a threshold without its freezing into a frontier' (Lichtenberg Ettinger, 1996:129). In the double knot of the face-to-face then, the face is turned into an intensity. It is the state of working hot for an artist and sitter/subject. In this I would suggest there is a qualitative transformation which involves the restructuring of the 'I' itself (Lotman, 1990:22). If, as I have argued, the face-to-face of portraiture involves a de-fection of identity, then the politics of portraiture can not be reduced simply to one of the mastery. Rather, it can be conceived of as an encounter of co-emerging elements through metramorphosis (Lichtenberg Ettinger, 1996:125), and in that there are risks for both artist and subject/sitter. Having travelled the length and breadth of Western Australian in a project Excessive Practice: Portraiture as Performance, I have experienced what it is to be undone in the process of making portraits. From shopping malls in the north of the state, to community arts centres in the south, I put down a ground sheet, propped up a board and got down on my hands and knees and drew people. As people came and sat and took away their drawings, I came to feel that a little bit more of me was being taken away. I felt with Anne-Marie. I was being dissolved and dissipated. As Anne Marie obseved: What really came to my mind was the intensity of how the painter would feel at the end of it. I expected them to be drained out. I was comparing it to what I have been through and I felt not sorry, but an empathy, quite an exciting experience to be part of it. (Anne Marie Smith) 1. All quotes from Anne Marie Smith are from an interview with Estelle Barrett conducted in Kalgoorlie in February 1990 2. I have borrowed the phrase 'the act of portrayal' from Paul Lubin's book of the same title. In The Act of Portrayal, Lubin argues that the artist, the subjects within the portraits and viewers are all involved in the construction of a portrait, they are all portrait makers. (Lubin 1985:xi) In recognizing the situatedness of making portraits, Lubin suggests that by Òcontinually calling attention to ourselves as historically located readers presently engaged in a culturally determined act of reading is more than simply a way of keeping ourselves honest. It is a way of gauging distanceÓ(Lubin 1985:xi) 3. The term 'working hot' is derived from Mary Fallon's novel Working Hot. Carolyn Chisholm, in her analysis of Mary Fallon's novel, argues that Mary Fallon produces a lingual performativity whereby language mimes the motions of the body. This capacity of language to mime the motions of the body has been termed ÔflexionÕ by Gilles Deleuze. Chisholm suggests that by Òimitating excessively the Ôpantomime of carnal acts between bodies, language (can) exceed its own structures in a radical verbal performativityÓ (Chisholm 1995:20). In other words, there is the potential for utterances to perform, rather than stand in for the object. In my paper 'Impulsive Practices: The Logic of Sensation and Painting' (Deleuze Symposium, Perth 1996), I argue that the intensity of the event of portraiture renders the possibility of a haptic performativity akin to Mary Fallon's lingual performativity. I suggest that the maniacally charged present of the performance space creates a tension, creates the 'rush' of working hot. It is the directness of touch, the tension between artist and sitter-subject that creates the 'heat of the moment' that eroticises the event. Barb Bolt 1 July 1997 References: Adams, P. (1993) ' The violence of paint' in A Benjamin (ed) Journal of philosophy and the visual arts: the body. Academy Group Ltd, London. Angel, M. (forthcoming) 'Life on Mars? faciality as a research diagram', presented at the Deleuze Symposium, Perth, December 1996 Bakhtin, M.M. (1995) ( trans. V Liapunov), ed. V Liapunov and M. Holquist, Towards a philosophy of the act, University of Texas Press, Austin. 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Face/ache: The de-fection of identity in portraiture