Descartes’ search for a universal language as well as a certainty grounded within the self has now found a home within the artistic nature of Existentialism. Kierkegaard’s dual authorships, as original models for Existentialism, have been rejuvenated today in contemporary expressions of dialogism as well as autopathography. In particular, the recent proliferation of autopathography, in both memoir and self-portraiture, has now become a primary method of communicating meaning in the wake of Post-Modern relativism. As exemplified in the work of Francesca Woodman, photographic self-portraiture can be seen as a final refuge for the opposing values of subjectivity as well as objectivity.
The twentieth-century will always be remembered as a significant period in art history, particularly because it was able to destroy numerous barriers of convention while effectively expanding the overall terrain of the lone artist. During this unprecedented time, notable art personalities like Josef Beuys (1921-1986) and Andy Warhol (1928-1987) respectively proclaimed that “everybody is an artist” and “everything is art.” While dramatic statements like these may seem liberating at first, they also drain art of any possible meaning at the same time. If everything is art, then nothing is art. In the end, it is not useful to say that “everything is art” because it dematerializes any shared communal conceptions of what art actually is. Generalizations always end up as generic assumptions, even this one. So before we begin to put forth any of our theories of art, we first have to acknowledge that the most defining aspect of art is its inherent nature to elude definition. For centuries, scholars have attempted to identify, categorically, the most fundamental components of art, only to have new artists come along and create masterpieces that do not conform to these generalized aesthetic formulas. Problems always arise when academic circles try to articulate what constitutes superior art because a recipe for excellence is so simplistic that it is ultimately never illuminating and, in the end, a significant artwork can readily disprove any of the given standards of excellence. Art, therefore, can never be formulized. Equipped with only history to deduce our present status, however, it becomes necessary to examine our past in order to envision our future.
“We are only what we repeatedly do.”
-Aristotle (384 B.C.E. – 322 B.C.E.)
While art has always inherently been some form of self-representation, it is generally regarded that the first artwork devoted solely to the genre of self-portraiture was never fully actualized until the relatively recent date of 1450. The late appearance of the self-portrait, in effect, headed the birth of the Renaissance. Today, however, self-portraiture is now common practice throughout the art world, yet it still remains a perplexing fact to how exactly it could take approximately 30,000 years, since the earliest known works of art, for self-portraiture to be recognized as a subject matter worthy of our attention. While there are many reasons for the emergence of the self-portrait onto the Renaissance landscape, most notable were the new socio-economic liberties of the artisan, the technological advances in the production of mirrors, as well as the artisan’s own self-promotion as an intellectual who could rival the nobility commissioning his work. There must be other factors at work here, however, which can account for the transformation of artisans from mere tradesmen into the ‘Renaissance man’ capable of mastering other fields outside his own artistic profession. Through newfound powers of self-creation, geniuses like Michelangelo (1440-1550) and Leonardo (1450-1520) became the first ‘art stars’ to successfully advance from humble artisans into artists and eventually into the legendary figures who are now forever immortalized throughout the pages of Giorgio Vasari’s 1550 biography ‘The Lives of the Artists.’
The appearance of the self-portrait, in effect, remains a striking landmark and visual reminder of the rising independence of the artist and intellectual. The rigid hierarchy of the feudal pyramid had slowly become dismantled and was eroded all together once the Copernican revolution ousted mankind from his center of the universe. An immutable order had been negated and the subsequent void could only be filled by the independent visionary.
Today, we can precisely place the advent of Modern philosophy in 1641 with Rene Descartes’ (1490-1560) proclamation “Cogito Ergo Sum” (“I think, therefore, I am”) because here was the first attempt to build a system of knowledge free from the outside influences of others and the orthodox canon dictated from previous generations. Following thinkers were left on their own to rise from the ashes with only Descartes’ cogito model to react to and it would not be until Soren Kierkegaard’s (1813-1855) nineteenth-century writings that a new philosophy would develop which truly centered itself around the individual – above and beyond any transcendental order.
In the twentieth-century, this liberation of the individual mind has now been largely responsible for, among other things, the development of Existentialism in philosophy, the explosion of memoir in literature, as well as for the continued exponential increase of self-portraiture in the visual arts. Led by the newest ‘art star’ Cindy Sherman (1954-present), the ascension of female self-portraiture would now empower women to take control over their own image and eventually proved crucial for the overall success of Feminism in the later half of the century. Indeed, as self-portraiture had once anticipated the coming of Modern philosophy, female self-portraiture would now usher in a Post-Modern era. Throughout all of this, however, images of the self continued to flourish and the invention of photography and film only allowed for a new means of self-awareness much in the same way the mirror and the first works of art had done once before. The individual must, necessarily, identify with something outside itself and these innovative mediums enabled one to emulate his/her own self, rather than merely following the others in the surrounding environment. All art is some form of self-portraiture and it is only recently that this basic fact has been able to become more and more apparent.
Today, however, our advances have paradoxically led to a new crisis in self because the self has only acquired an unbounded and, therefore, uncertain identity. In simpler times, there was always at least something reassuring in knowing your exact place in the social order, no matter how lowly it might actually be. Only after the decisive split with the surrounding community, world, and known universe had the mind been able to begin to truly grasp itself but these divisions also exposed inherent fractures even within the self which art is now trying to mend through its persistent attempts to define personal identity.
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