Catalogue essays by Ihor Holubizky and David Moos

Images

Catalogue essay by Ihor Holubizky

Portraiture, Subjects, and the Autobiographical

Why was portraiture so difficult to deal with in high school art history–trying to develop enthusiasm for the mute subject. The painting itself was not a consideration (treated as dead as the subject), and at best a misguided examination of period style and fashion. Adding to the problem was the off-picture life of the subject, reduced to the same dry recitation as history was delivered, and that of the artist–a life measured painting to painting–factual information without the invigoration of chaos and ideas.

It is little wonder that portraiture–in general–does not appear at the top of the list of subjects for contemporary painting. Admired works are the views out, the sweep of history (including the consensual moments of old guard-new guard upheaval), graphic signs, or no subject at all. If the work is figurative, it is most likely an embodiment of style–Impressionist, Cubist, Surrealist, Pop, and so on. A decoy. Think of De Kooning's women, Baselitz's hangers-on, or Francis Bacon's paintings–not so much portrait figures as the body in the throes of torment. Something we can all relate to. Portraiture in contemporary art is thought of as a throw-back–Lucien Freud to Stanley Spencer, or contemporaries such as Philip Pearlstein being off the track. Even David Hockney's much-admired portraits are held in lesser regard than his languid views of California fin de siècle. There are rare exceptions–the work of Frida Kahlo–but this is an autobiographical anomaly in the big picture. Painters of the face scamper about–in some pundit's view–as the puny denizens of a Jurassic Park.

Appreciating portraiture is like having to re-learn the meaning of painting and perhaps art-making itself. It happens. Visiting the Dahlem museum in Berlin some years ago, I came across a modest Bronzino portrait. Certainly not impressive, relative to the scale of the museum's holdings, but there was something about this painting, coming into contact with it. The face shot through all the rhetoric, theorizing and scholarship that could be (and is) attached to it. I was looking at someone and captured by the act of painting.

Such moments and revelations are all the more remarkable considering the cult of the face in this century–the mechanical reproduction through photography, its circulation and pervasiveness. But the relationship between painter and sitter in portraiture is distinctly different from the camera subject. Traditionally, the former is a sustained activity; an unfolding of craft and subject over a period of time. (Having sat for portraits, I am painfully aware of the control and composure required by both parties.) It is an averaging out of successive moments to look like a single moment, a snapshot. No wonder portraiture has looked formal.

It is often said that portraiture collapsed because of photography and media. The same should be true of painting landscapes and the still life, but somehow they have survived the modernist housecleaning of history. The big face in contemporary art–Chuck Close, for example–seems to me less about painting than the system of the grid, the photographic source. Current work about the face is invariably photo-based–Thomas Ruff, Mary Jo-Lafontaine, Genevieve Cadieux–a kissing cousin to the billboard, via film.

Cinema provided a marketing vehicle for the cult. That face, which launches a thousand ships, now fills a space the size of a building and is played in hundreds of locations at the same time. The revolution was the close-up, the extreme close-up of the eyes and lips. Fragments on the scale of Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade balloons, floating in front of us. These cinematic devices become signs of intimacy, to reveal or substitute for the stare into the soul. Movies also re-figure the idea of characterization–not the portrayal of characters in live theatre, but an invention by recognizable actors (stars). Their portrayals are fixed in the heavens of celluloid and the memorable overcomes the unbelievable. Is anyone really convinced by Marlon Brando as Julius Caesar? Humphrey Bogart as anyone but Bogey? The metamorphosis–the incredible made believable–is part of Scherman's strategy in portraiture. It is not the historical accuracy (a simulation), but the representation of the character, the character under suspicion.

Captain Louis Renault, in Casablanca, utters a classic film cliché, "Round up the usual suspects" (and most likely a cliché before Casablanca). By suspect, he refers to probability and familiarity. Objectivity be damned–seeking truth or justice. The roundup is a presumption of guilt, not the assumption of innocence. All is suspect and everyone is implicated, even the accuser and the victim. It makes for suspense and a better story.

David Thomson positions Renault's line at the outset of his book Suspects (Secker & Warburg, London, 1985)–a compendium of biographical notes that extend the off-screen lives of on-screen characters. The half-truth is based on what we can determine from the 90 minute time frame of film narrative. The blurring of reality, the on-screen lives, and fiction, off-screen lives, has become commonplace. George Burns, as half of a real-life couple, consistently winked at the television audience. Desi and Lucy had a real-life child and wrote him into their television series. The television character of Murphy Brown is criticized by the (then) Vice President, Dan Quayle, for setting a bad example as a single mother and undermining family values. The reply comes in a fictional retort where the Murphy Brown character reacts to the real life controversy. In the film, Last Action Hero, a Schwarzenegger-like character–Jack, played by Schwarzenegger–comes off the screen only to discover that he no longer has his on-screen prowess. In one sequence, in a video store, Jack discovers that his real-life screen rival, Sylvester Stallone, has taken his (Schwarzenegger's) part in his own films. Film mimics film, imitating life, and replicates endlessly in a loop. The best example in the current loop cult is an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The crew are trapped in a repeated destruction of the Starship Enterprise through a space-time anomaly. The episode itself (being television), is doomed to be looped in the nether world, a space time anomaly of syndication repeats.

The portrait galleries of the 20th century are fast and disposable–the cover of Time magazine and the record jacket (until its demise, courtesy of the heinous CD "jewel box"). There is another type of loop–the repetition of certain personages on the cover of Time, buy through the record cover, we could see the transition of Bob Dylan from well scrubbed, youthful folk singer to the dazed motorcycle rebel of Blonde on Blonde. Pop records favoured the descent (where Time magazine presumed maturity). The Beatles became hairier and hermit-like, paralleling their private-public careers. The Rolling Stones refined their vulgarity to the point of self-parody. (Their loop is to never stop touring, hence "The Grumpy Old Men" comment by David Letterman.) Not so for middle-America performers, Frank Sinatra and Perry Como. Their record covers are a cryogenic container–the stasis of the doomed, and the damned.

Artists such as Nancy Burson have used computer-photo systems to invent genetic mutations–faces that have a frightening presence of the real and the unreal, but the possibilities of distortion are no less evident in the straight portrait. Yosef Karsh's photographs are revered as being definitive–windows to the soul, and to the world. That's how we will always see his subjects. Are we, however, looking at Karsh first, then the camera, and forgetting the ready-known? Winston Churchill had bulldog determination attributed to him decades before. Karsh's photograph serves only to verify this. In the recent example of Karsh's Bill Clinton, there is an uncanny resemblance to his portrait of President John F. Kennedy, three decades earlier. Both are captured in a moment of angelic piety–a backlit profile shot, with hands clasped–the hope of their respective generations (here, irony abounds). Has the soul catcher's trick been revealed? The same may be said for Annie Leibovitz's photographs, nurtured in the counter-culture of Rolling Stone magazine. She has claimed not to know how to take a glamour photograph, à la Karsh. Then again, her subjects do not aspire to that glamour, the modern nobility or piety. They are culture renegades. Leibovitz plays their game with off-centre compositions, quirky backdrops, unnatural lighting and props. We are looking at her subjects through her camera.

Scientists announce a computer programme that recognizes faces; "The biggest difficulty is trying to replicate the neural networks that make up the brain...but Dr. Sergent of McGill (University) doubts that there would ever be an automated recognition system as flexible and foolproof as the human brain.

February 21, 1994. The Globe and Mail (Toronto, Canada)

For all their technological authority, computer renderings are less convincing than the artist's sketch. The latter is based on observation as reportage. The computer sketch simulates the face by grafting from an inventory of eyes, chins, noses and foreheads. The results are like Dr. Frankenstein's off-casts and, of course, all look like criminals.

If the camera is not the final word on portraiture, it also allows the painter to return and fill in the blank spots. One version of this painting is the wired roundup–the simulations of a Warhol cavalcade. The other is a response to the material quality of paint, revealing its nature as much as the nature of the subject.

Scherman has rounded up suspects on occasion; the metamorphosis of his cast of Greek gods and near-god characters in The Rape of Io and Rape of Callisto series; the haute couture photography of the little black dress in his Black Widow works; the characters of the matador, wife and bull in another cycle of paintings. Jupiter is back in a cameo, tugging at his tie. Callisto returns in the guise of Veronica Lake (no less plausible than Brando-Caesar). The masquerade is a charade.

In one off-screen biography, David Thomson follows Richard Blaine (Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca), and Louis (Captain Renault), after Ilsa's plane departs at the end of the movie. Louis knows about Rick's latent homosexuality. They go south, together, to live in Marrakech, "sitting out in the sun, slipping a coin in an Arab boy's hand in return for one of those sweet cordials." Rick dies in 1949. The disclaimer at the end of the films is "any similarity to characters living or dead is coincidental." Who believes it? This is where the other story begins.

Who is Sherman Billingsly? Eartha Kitt sings (he) "even cooks for me"

- Monotonus, Siegel-Carroll, c. 1950's.

Macbeth takes centre stage. If the ingredients of eroticism and lust, deception and revenge, the fall from grace, are common to the mythology of Scherman's Io and Callisto cycle, there is an important distinction. We can excuse or distance ourselves from the seamy aspects of Greek mythology (although Scherman does not), because antiquity's golden age cannot be tarnished. The Greeks were noble and enlightened and their gods, if not model citizens, played their shortcomings as immortals. In contrast, Norman England (or Norman Scotland), was the underbelly of Western history and in Macbeth, played out from the bawdy perspective of Shakespeare's England.

Macbeth has been filmed many times–a D.W. Griffith production (1915), a contemporary American gangster setting in Joe Macbeth (1956), Kurosawa's stylized Throne of Blood with a medieval Japanese setting (1957), and Roman Polanski's blood and splatter version (1971). The most controversial may have been Orson Welles' papier maché version with Scottish burr (1948).

"Orson Welles' Macbeth leaves the spectator deaf and blind"

- Jean Cocteau.

For Scherman, there is a lure of the found story, worthy of re-examination and re-telling. His character study spins off Lady Macbeth–the woman of ambition, driving the indecisive and guilt-ridden Macbeth. She aspires to rid her husband of his lowly beginnings (the gangster plot with a smart moll). Conventionally, Lady Macbeth is cast as a selfish bitch, the agent provocateur, the snake luring Macbeth to fail and fall. In the Canadian Festival Editions publication, 1972 (based on a Stratford Festival production in 1971), she is drawn as a stoop-shouldered Lizzie Borden, brandishing a pair of cleavers. Lady Macbeth has her come-uppance when the plot fails. The moral focus comes into view and the witches' prophecy comes to pass. Scherman's attraction to Macbeth and Lady Macbeth is more than the first, easy stop, and challenges what we presume to know and believe about the play, its moral lessons and narrative clichés. He raises the stakes of events by a radical re-casting and edit. Scherman follows the complexities of events by painting the single frame portrait, complete as phantasmagoria, and keeping the sword play off-screen.

Lady Macbeth is introduced in her off-screen life–the better days prequel at Dungarvon. She looks for all the world like the blonde bombshell of British B films, Diana Dors, a time shift or loop to England in the 1950's, not the 1050's. (There is another B side to this less than candid portrait. Call it the Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.) Scherman picks her up later as the play begins in Lady Macbeth in the Mirror. She is still in control, but no longer posed, caught off guard, caught in the act. Her determined look is underscored by a dense black background. (By Scherman's direction, she is in the driver's seat.) A blue shimmering apparition (the unexplained), runs the length of the painting. The apparition is not in focus and hovers–a portent of what is to come, but for her, also a sign to proceed. (It may be, from the title, the film device of a reflected establishing shot.) The follow-up is a closely cropped vertical. One eye is showing and lips are pursed. Not spoiled goods yet, but spoiling. This portrait is the close up–the camera moving in on giganticism. If we move in closer it breaks up, goes out of focus, becomes abstract. (Sitting in the first row has its dangers.) After the murder, Lady Macbeth is seen once again in the "mirror" composition, but something is wrong. The definition is gone. The screen, in television terms, is breaking up. In theatrical terms, the smoke machine is working full tilt. Off camera light turns it into haze. Colours are softened and bleached–a nondescript pink-beige.

At the end of Act II, things are not looking good. Her lips are soft and puffy. The chin is quivering. Eyes are closing. Her mouth is blackened–a black hole. A cheap, un-regal earring exposes the charade.

Scherman has not forgotten the supporting cast in this revision. There is Banquo, murdered by Macbeth. He reappears as a ghost in the banquet scene, but not like any ghost we have seen on the screen (they run the gamut from the melodramatic, chain rattling anguish of a Marley in A Christmas Carol to Patrick Swayze's sexy, doleful portrayal in Ghost). Scherman's Banquo is Jake Lamotta in Raging Bull, seen from below, the glass jaw prominent, eyes shut, the bludgeoned nose telling us more than the tale of the tape. The noble (dumb) warrior has gone one round too many. Past the count–frozen. It's over.

Macbeth's mother has a cameo (the poor woman is not in the original), as a textual aside, here the victim of the tabloid interview. She doesn't know what's gone wrong either, but the physiognomy tells the story–tight lips, a ruddy peasant complexion (Macbeth's secret).

Macbeth himself has not been overlooked, but Scherman has saved him for a dramatic cut-away–the flashback and flash forward. In two portraits (a diptych or split screen), Scherman has moved in tight, a shot showing the forehead, the nose, but no mouth. In the first he is absorbed. Off-camera, the first prophecy of the witches is being delivered. His steely-eyed reaction is one of guarded skepticism. In the latter, Macbeth is listening but is looking elsewhere. His eyes have blurred, not teary, but having seen too much. The tale, as with Banquo, is told in the "Nose of the Turk." (Act IV, Scene I)

I should not be too quick to discount the eyes. As I rushed out the door in mid draft–a crisp, still Summer noon, I heard Angel Eyes drifting from a house on the street. At that moment I was transported to a Summer–of '62, '63, '64...Film soundtracks have locked this association into our consciousness, but I sometimes wonder why we can be trapped by such sentiment and not in paintings. My second reaction was wanting to be transported elsewhere. Paris invariably becomes Paris, Texas.

To this soupçon Scherman has added another ingredient–a dog advancing face-on, in water up to its neck. Goya's dog. A Reservoir Dog. "When Birnam Wood Comes to Dunsinane" is the witches' prophecy of Macbeth's downfall. In Macbeth, the soldiers led by Malcolm, son of the murdered King Duncan, cut down the trees to conceal their advance. The treachery of camouflage becomes a masquerade–the transformation of trees to dog with the unwavering determination of El Mariachi. "Terminate with extreme prejudice." (Apocalypse Now) Scherman has, in this painting, canceled the literalism of illustration. As much as any work in the cycle, he has delivered the goods–the objective of a portraiture restoration by painting a portrait the likes of which...

Why should we care about off-screen lives more than a what if game tied to trivial pursuit. David Thomson does it by drawing a wide net of characters from divergent films–Casablanca, It's A Wonderful Life, to China Town. Scherman draws in the history of painting. Not only the figurative tradition of the great portraitists, but by unraveling the history of modernist painting, its heroic, spiritual axioms, to his own vision. I could, at this point, play the role of aficionado and invoke connections. Walter Sickert's The Painter in His Studio, 1907 (Collection, Art Gallery of Hamilton)–a view thicker than London pea soup fog, through the mirror to some circumspect goings-on. The artists caught off guard. Or we could consider Walter Murch's Enlarged Mechanical Doll, 1965 (Private Collection)–the automaton transforming into being with the artist skimming Chardin off the top in the process. But the painter's enterprise, like the Starship, defies such patented comparisons. The ship is always in motion, to "go where no one has gone before." What I can provide, in the on-going mission, is an observation–a verification of position and co-ordinates. The restoration I spoke of can be compared to Orson Welles' black and white cinematography. Kane and the Ambersons were up against the glamour of Technicolor epics, musicals (and other fantasies), and the bluntness of documentaries and newsreels (the Depression, the War). Welles' palette of tone and light–the tracking of the face and the social scene–were fictions based on observation, to reveal more than could be imagined. Scherman's painting picks up that condition like a filter. The purification process is working but what we see as evidence, in the filter itself, is the grit. It's all there. It's all true.

Sample Time: Film and the Frame of Painting

David Moos

Because you now know that the following words recount actions between two characters in a film, you will not mistake them for a transcription of events in the lives of someone you or I have met or known. No one has encountered these people; they have only existed in the projected light and time of cinema, in the one film in which they appeared as characters. Picture one scene from this movie.

Like other women who work the Keyhole Club, her job consists of appearing in small booths, each a diorama of a real setting (whether it be a hotel room, diner, etc.), and conversing with male patrons. Men watch her from behind the plate glass of a one-way mirror, the prop of a window, and speak to her through a telephone receiver. Over a monitor she hears their voices; she might reply to their questions, say something provocative, or just listen. She is good at listening. Vocal intercourse fills the void left open by the imbalance of vision. The man can see her, but she can only watch herself in reflection. Their bodies never touch. The man sits behind the mirror shrouded in his dark privacy, while the woman is glaringly lighted in her setting. He is simply a voice over a monitor, an anonymous tonality. For what has the man come here? Merely to speak to a woman, to observe her in detail while her gaze of him is canceled by the mirror? This, indeed, is the dynamic of the image excerpted from the narrative of cinema.

For the image to acquire greater significance we would have to hear the voices of the man and the woman, listen to what they say. Also, we should need to know aspects of who they are, what has brought them into this scene. The narrative of the film supplies us, the viewers, with such knowledge and plays with its pictorial growth. If, for example, you were to know that the man and woman once lived together and were married, once loved each other "more than he ever felt possible,"1 their coming together in this setting would acquire fresh relevance. If you knew that neither had had any contact with the other for over four years, that each had tracelessly disappeared from the other for this time–a time expressed as half the life of their abandoned son–then their interaction may possess the mythic aura of reunion. Such contextual information qualifies the cinematic image that depicts the characters. It inscribes their faces with experience, investing their actions and words with the drama of becoming.

Not simply, however, do the actions of characters describe who they are, but their particular histories as told through moving images furnish their appearance with evocative significance. Through television especially, we have become accustomed to piecing narratives rapidly together. It is a sequential process that must happen over time. In film, time can be rendered through the relatively slow movement of a narrating voice, or the faster pace of sheer imagery. Film embodies a flexibility that permits radical temporal leaps and compressions. Whole years may elapse in an instant, while certain moments may endure for days, repeating and returning.

Synecdoche and metonymy are tropes that choreograph time in cinema. A part for a longer whole, one scene representing countless others, the episode that altered a life–time collides and converges in cinema. Contractions that express magnifications mold the narratives of feature film. Within this constellation of represented time, however, there is no notation for the time involved in the making of the film–the actual time required for production of the image. There are inherent gaps between a film's running time, the time inscribed within the narrative of the film (days, weeks, years, etc.), and the time taken to create and suture the final product.

Painting possesses similar temporal and technical oscillations. In the play of thought and its production in paint, there is no method of recording the pauses, annotating the silences, when looking dominates an idle brush. Cézanne's later work, chiefly his landscapes, typifies this condition of looking and temporality relative to the world external to his canvases. By utilizing a successive brushstroke, discrete and legible to the viewer, he sought to bring into contact the moments of observing nature with those required for its re-creation within the planar space of painting. Each stroke comes to valorize a tripartite conception of time: the time of looking, the time of perceptual transcription, and the time of painting. Whether in portraiture or landscape, this technique was utilized in an effort to "depict matter as it takes on form," as philosopher Merleau-Ponty phrased it. "Cézanne," he continues, "did not think he had to choose between feeling and thought, between order and chaos." In the structuring of his canvases Cézanne endeavored to consolidate a spontaneous and concrete organization of "nature," psychological perception, and painting:

We see the depth, the smoothness, the softness, the hardness of objects; Cézanne even claimed we see their odor. If the painter is to express the world, the arrangement of his colors must carry with it this invisible whole, or else his picture will only hint at things and will not give them in the imperious unity, the presence, the insurpassable plentitude which is for us the definition of the real. That is why each brushstroke must satisfy an infinite number of conditions.2

If painting, especially narrative painting, is to constitute with the brushstroke a "definition of the real," it must resolve the collapse of separate orders into the composite image of its own depictive fiction. The "invisible whole" of the external world must find formulation in paint, within a new system where the brushstroke "satisf[ies] an infinite number of conditions."

The brushstroke becomes the primary autonomous element central to the creating of an image, a vision of the world commensurate to how the eye perceives and the mind experiences. The stroke seeks to serve and trigger the imagination, to render thought its own reactive and affective processes. A painted image allows subjective responses to be brought into psychic unity with vision. This process can be narrated both in terms of theory and content, a fiction and its object.

The relationship between image and world in the paintings of Tony Scherman narrates constructs in a manner akin to that of film. It is difficult to think about representation in painting today void of the plenitude of photographic and cinematic imagery. The example invoked above, taken from Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas (1984), illuminates the tightly focused visual terrain Scherman addresses in his work. By closely analyzing one culminating scene in the film, I wish to call attention to the way that Wenders depicts representations external to the image itself. Through his adroit direction of two characters, a man and a woman, and through the meticulous control of their movements and the camera's, a theoretical model of narrative is revealed. The frame of cinema allows us to understand the frame of Scherman's "portrait" painting, where each of his figures is resonant with participation in larger experiential narratives. The content of stories, visual histories of lives, is told within the parable of the gaze.

The episode at the Keyhole Club occurs near the end of Paris, Texas. Because we have followed the characters throughout the course of the movie, when we watch this encounter we regard the man and woman with an acute consciousness of what import their decisions entail. They are no longer figures in a generalized fiction. The man we are more familiar with. Unlike the woman, who has recently appeared, the film has disclosed much about his life. We have followed him on a journey, geographical as well as internal, that he aspires to conclude through the meeting of this woman–his wife whom he has traced to the Keyhole Club. Until this point, the entire film has been observed through the man's point of view. Here, however, the perspective will shift. In the peculiar mirroring environment of the club, resolution to his quest will only be achieved through an inversion of perspectives delivered by the camera and its doubling metaphors that traverse the mirror.

Within the triangle of man, woman, and audience, she alone lacks the knowledge that the man behind the mirror is her husband. He has come here to explain why their marriage disintegrated into a grim tale of paranoia and domestic violence. "Can I tell you something?" he asks her, as he sits down. He begins a monologue, the recounting of their once harmonious, then sordid past: "I knew these people...." Deliberately, in the narratological anonymity of the third person, his story unfolds. As his telling proceeds, she will come to realize that the voice behind the mirror is her husband's; certain unmistakable details about their past will disclose his identity:

She told him that she dreamed about escaping. That was all she dreamed about. Escape. She saw herself at night running naked down a highway. Running across fields. Running down riverbeds. Always running. And always, when she was just about to get away–he'd be there. He'd stop her somehow. He'd just appear and stop her.

And when she told him these dreams, he believed them. He knew she had to be stopped or she'd leave him forever. So he tied a cow bell to her ankle so he'd hear at night if she tried to get out of bed. But she learned how to muffle the bell by stuffing a sock in it and inching her way out of bed and into the night. He caught her one night when the sock fell out, and he heard her trying to run to the highway. He caught her and he dragged her back to the trailer and tied her to the stove with his belt.3

The time taken to read this excerpt from his much longer monologue is rendered by the camera with one fixed image.

At the beginning of his story the camera is positioned on his side of the mirror. The lens sees past him and through the mirror to encompass her body and the casual reactive language of her posing. She adjusts herself, interjecting coy questions and terse remarks. Her generic responses, inflected with a degree of ennui, are indicative of her profession. The camera shifts nervously, watching her. As the monologue progresses, however, recognition begins to flicker across her face. At this point the camera moves in, closing upon her face and for the first time crossing through the mirror onto her side. While his narrative deepens to describe the crevices of his pathological jealousy, the screen becomes completely occupied by her face–immobilized by the dawning realization that the client's voice behind the mirror may be that of her estranged husband. Within the sudden novelty of her visual space we see her face intently listening to his confessional scenario that, as it unfolds, can only be her own.

Here the film is crucially focused. As he continues to speak, her face, occupying the full frame, becomes the surface upon which the memory of inter-personal experience is transacted. She no longer looks toward the mirror or directly into the camera. As his voice rolls on her gaze lengthens, head frozen, side-turned toward the infinity of a shattered history. For over a minute her face is thus held.

Such a vision of the human face–a magnified projection of utter emotion–is unique perhaps to the medium of film. A look crosses her face, the chimera of doubt resolving as fact. The spoken narrative suffuses her face with the movement of thought, recognition and remembrance. Subjective intricacies of a relationship that turned to ashes and that she has buried in her private history now play like so many shadows across her staid visage. A materialist perspective of how cinema obtains union between surface and submerged meaning would regard the "skin" as inclusive subject of all signification:

As Siegfried Kracauer effectively demonstrates, the camera photographs the skin; it cannot function like an X-ray machine and show what is underneath. This does not mean, however, that the film-maker has no control over the surfaces rendered by his camera. On the contrary, he chooses his surfaces for their content, and through their careful selection and juxtaposition builds a structure of feeling and meaning...4

The spacings between the man speaking and the woman listening support such a reading of cinema's capability as a medium. The particular dynamic of this image, however, produces a temporal and narratological conjunction that sublates the primacy of surface. In this particular scene the elongated cinematic moment does in fact function "like an X-ray machine [to] show what is underneath," transcending the literality of appearance–piercing with meaning the surface of the screen.

The monologic narrative is beyond picturing. There can be no flashbacks or pictorial references to this past. To attain profound emotive resonance, the camera forces exclusivity on the face of the woman absorbing the man's monologue. It is beneath the skin, into the eyes and through them that the camera insists on looking. The eyes breach the surface of the skin, becoming the prime attribute enabling detailed intercourse with this terrible past. The woman's eyes proffer near-experiential, temporal entry, beneath the skin surface of the present audible narrative. Her eyes project her and us backward in time, acting out a psychic place where she once lived.

Through her eyes, figuratively and literally, her husband's voice narrates and renders the past. The visually confined camera can perform no action other than the fixed display of her face. Any background is occluded, the frame fully centered around her consuming, listening/seeing eyes. "The enormous eyes on the screen," one scholar observes, "intimate that even their surfaces can be penetrated as they, mirrors of the character's feelings, penetrate the dramatic and emotional fiction they scrutinize."5

As opposed to skin, the surface of flesh, the eyes within film happen to operate as pure analogy to the peculiar construction of the Keyhole Club and of this narrative in a larger context. That the woman's eyes on the screen acquire a depthless transparency, mirrors that can be penetrated, describes the function of the one-way mirror:

Photographed in response, the eyes engage us in a specular activity that invites us to attain their standard acuity, a "deep" sight that measures depth of feeling. The eyes on screen that register an emotional response are cues for the emotional response of the viewer. Other visual/dramatic media, deprived of the magnifying and kinetic power of close-ups, cannot capture the urgent power processes of a performer's sight.6

How is this "specular activity" generated? When the eyes become the framed focus of the cinematic image, the screen itself can be construed as a mirror of the action that takes place in front of the lens, playing its two-dimensional flatness against the narrative fiction of depth. This self-reflexivity, brilliantly configured by Wenders, doubles and internalizes the direction and depth of sight, imbricating metaphor over disclosure.

Such a condition of vision is of central importance to the painting of Tony Scherman. His aim is to bifurcate theoretical perception of the canvas: it becomes both surface and mirror; it both renders and reflects reality. Our awareness of this aim, furthered through the cinema, begins to explain his choice of subject matter and mode of depiction, underscoring a conceptual tact that unsettles or inter-poses the positions of viewer and viewed. A consistent motive, illustrated by the eye, can be traced throughout his recent work.

In Scherman's portrait paintings the eye becomes the human feature of central importance. Often the eyes are disclosed in a magnified, invasive moment. Their depiction "close-up," on a scale that matches the cinematic, enables us as viewers to become privy to "the power processes of a performer's sight." In two recent portraits of Macbeth, Scherman seeks to divulge such dynamics in literal terms–to offer us the eyes of ambition, the look of deceit, conquest in the face of prophecy. In each painting we find the same eyes contemplating different moments in a plot of supreme transgression, a visual meditation on how treachery molds the soul.

The mimicry of each painting to the other proposes a seriality to portraiture. Unmistakably these faces are the same, belong to the same character that Scherman has tracked. These equally sized canvases frame the forehead, eyes, and nose in exactly the same compositional location, reiterating that the eyes preoccupy the center of perception and recognition. Conspicuously, the mouth is omitted. These are soundless portraits, dwelling in the realm of vision alone, intensifying the power of the mind to see through to its own fate. In the first portrait, Macbeth's eyes hint toward the conspiracy of imminent deeds, while in the second, they betray the consequences of the murder(s) he has committed.

Tony Scherman has chosen to anchor his portrait paintings in specific textual narratives. He produces paintings in series, finding a story to suit his needs and then searching it for critical moments, salient transactions between characters. Every narrative has its key points, where the lives of characters alter dramatically. These episodes, reminiscent of similar situations arising in our lives, intrigue Scherman's imagination. In recent years he has relied upon Ovid's Metamorphoses as his source book for the dramatis personae of affective ambition. The priapic pursuits of Jupiter, in particular, have preoccupied his cyclic paintings, which trace the god's indulgent manipulations of the unsuspecting nymphs Io and Callisto. There is always a hint of duplicity, an unsavory air of the uncertain, a second thought, as deeds done return to haunt seemingly casual players within the meta-narrative. Introspection, pleasure, and leisure are all converted into ambition, lust, and deception. As characters appearing at ease may double as victims, those who are self-assured become unmasked as victimizers.

This is one way of reading the specular. The portrait painting can no longer be looked upon as reflection, but is rather a refraction, at times a contortion disclosing other aspects of people's alternative, furtive selves. Recourse to the magnified "close-up" serves Scherman well. He has little need of presenting the classically framed, compositionally comfortable portrait head within the rectangles of his paintings. Odd croppings and asymmetrical framings of characters' heads populate his canvases which are bent upon seeing a detail, revealing some ensign of a crippled personality, a peculiar, confidential trait that will divulge a hidden motive, tell of a secret history.

Macbeth is, of course, an ideal candidate for such a vision. But it is not simply his demonic deeds that qualify him as a subject for Scherman. In the jargon of portraiture as depiction of extremity (Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud come to mind), a host of more bloodthirsty and depraved characters could be found–anyone, say, from Tiberius to Charles Manson. Scherman is not a purveyor of curios and finds little interest in charnel feats per se. A deeper, more subtle textual motive underpins his portraits, and the formal terminology of his paintings betrays his desire to depict the human psyche in juxtaposition to itself. A character devoid of scruples would possess no conflict of motives, acting in the abandon that obliterates the consciousness of good and evil. Macbeth emerges as penultimate character: caught between his avarice for power and his standards of decency, once he has committed his murder(s) his conscience surfaces to torture him with hallucinations. He, like his determined wife, is unable to reconcile the memory of experience. As Shakespeare has written Macbeth, the trauma of treachery is narrated through sequences of false visions and prophetic sleeplessness–the perpetrators, through murder, must now dwell in the visions of their own nightmares. "'Sleep no more!/Macbeth does murder sleep'–the innocent sleep," (Act II, Scene 2, ll. 35-36) Macbeth cries to his wife, upon returning from Duncan, who he has slain in his bed.

It is crucial that hallucinatory remorse does not coyly appear only after the first murder has been committed. Macbeth is not merely haunted by his own crimes; his character is more refined, and the play is tragic precisely because it traces the downfall of a respected warrior, a man who when first contemplating murder is repelled by what his imagination conjures. The drama is transacted in the imagery of mind, furnishing forth the shapes of conscience and visions of excess. Immediately prior to his murder of Duncan, Macbeth is overtaken by the ethereal vision of a dagger. Here his soliloquy becomes surreptitious, self-doubting, his conscience muttering misgivings in heated hesitation:

Is this a dagger I see before me,

the handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.

I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

To feeling, as to sight? or art thou but

A dagger of the mind, a false creation,....7

The premonitory fabrication of consciousness, the hovering murder weapon stained with blood, foretelling wickedness, casts Macbeth into skeins of contradiction. To paint the eyes of such a mind, to expose those internal workings and semblances of ethical doubt is Scherman's main concern. It is not that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are caught objecting their fate, but that their odyssey is fraught with blurrings of consciousness and invisible visions–these are the topics of their portraits. As the text reveals, the episodic inquiry within–the contests of dreams–is the subject matter of these painted people.

Liberties taken by Scherman with the posing and picturing of his characters can all be reconciled within this scheme, a narrative of emplottment that seeks to know the inside of violence. In adopting the visual syntax of cinema–namely the close-up and the sequential–Scherman manages scrutiny of his subjects with piercing intimacy. Often we are too near, asked to witness the subject as if we were peering from an impossible coign of vantage–the kind of all-powerful disclosure afforded by such a device as, say, the one-way mirror or the zoom lens.

Lady Macbeth, then, as we encounter her through these paintings, appears in two radically different states of being. She debuts imbued with those gracious traits that allowed Duncan to greet her as "fair and Noble hostess." She is seen as if in a dream (hers or ours?), on an otiose frolic when she was young. Later, however, we experience her near the desperate end. She discovers herself in a mirror, perceiving glimmers of her shattered self, the guilt-ridden "fiend-like queen" of Macbeth. Here the painted image itself bleeds into molten patches along the right side, an optical anagram for collusion, visualizing the exhaled sound from a mouth aghast at the sight of herself.

Such depictions of people stalk the human character in moments of supreme self-revelation. Scherman seeks to envision in paint an emotive conflict that dwells in those parts of our private beings impermeable to articulation, to subsequent rendering. This is the meaning of their display, of seeing through the mirror to proffer surface as overlarge sensation. The encaustic medium amplifies the surface, intriguing our sensibilities with a certain lushness, yet withholding the image from resolute depiction.

At stake is not merely the elusive post-structuralist debate about sign and referent, representation and reality–the surface/depth controversy rotating around that hidden quest for "true meaning." A profound turn begins to occur in the textual that finds ambitious formulation in paint–in portrait heads posed as total image. Often, there are no accoutrements, no hints of setting. In terms of a Barthean construct, these image begin to release the signifier (the content of an image) from its basis in assumed, pre-constructed meanings (the implications of an image.) As Barthes has remarked regarding the value of sheer imageness: "...hence the difficulty in naming it. My reading remains suspended between the image and its description, between definition and approximation."8 Indeed, how shall we refer to the paintings? The portraits of Macbeth, of Lady Macbeth, of Banquo as murdered Ghost–can they be freely construed as people or must they be read in narratological terms specific to who they are textually? Shall each be defined in strictly painterly terminology as the creation of a brush, or rather as combination of the brush's pattern and its accumulation as dense, pictorial image? The suspension of these competing possibilities is precisely the kinetic network that Scherman's imagery chases.

The issue of representation is splintered. The medium is self-consciously exercised to subvert fixity of an iconic image. As a group, these paintings attest to the brush's ability to pursue crisp detail or indulge the soft blur of a drifting focus. Either can be produced at will. We can control reference through contact (visual) with the painting and through a process of integration with how this image relates to our experience of reality, our lived knowledge of the world. Herein lies the logic of dwelling in texts that foundationally involve our culture. "If a narrative operates deeply enough, as do the Ovidean and Shakespearean texts," Scherman has noted, "then this seemingly buried knowledge becomes genetic. It is what we and our culture are, the narrative is a strand in our being."9 His assumption is that such texts play an effective role in structuring our experience. Interactions among people, however casual or profound, can be equated with aspects of these texts; much of modern cinema could also be limned within these categories.

When a text is employed for the generation of imagery, as Scherman does, we might treat it along Barthes' lines, "between definition and approximation." That is all it will provide; the description will never be whole, even the supposed truths it lays claim to cannot be recovered–neither from the outside world nor from the text itself. This is the liberating insight of narrative: while the story is interesting, we are always most interested in how it is told. When we encounter a portrait of Lady Macbeth, bikini-clad and on her knees, what are we to make of the portrait? Rather than conceive this as some hideous contemporary interpretation, we might ponder other interpretations, possibilities within the image (and text) that force fiction to compete with fact, history to reckon with truth. How, Scherman's paintings inquire, will the way that a person actually is in the world be adequately described through paint? The answer will be, as in film, that the character depicted is the only character–that the medium will never know the person, but out of itself will create a specific character who stands in for the person.

Shakespeare, in the writing of Macbeth, for example, opened up this most current of contemporary artistic and epistemological insights. In its crafting Shakespeare relied chiefly upon Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles, which appeared in 1587. Two separate sections provided the raw material: the "Historie of Makbeth" and the murder of King Duff by Donwald. While much of Macbeth depends upon Holinshed, the play is a work of artistic ingenuity in the truest sense. On stage the impression is given that the events transpired over several months, whereas Macbeth actually reigned for seventeen years. In the Chronicles, the murder of King Duff is carried out not by his host, but by four of the latter's hired servants. Shakespeare has Macbeth commit the corresponding murder (of Duncan) to augment the severity of betrayal. In Holinshed, Banquo is murdered after the banquet, not before, as in Macbeth. This change in timing permits the Ghost of Banquo to appear, causing the frantic behavior of Macbeth at the banquet. Indeed, the brief, significant opening scene, the dagger scene, the banquet scene, and the sleepwalking scene have no counterpart in the Chronicles.10 Liberties taken by Shakespeare, then, in what was recent by written recorded history testify to Shakespeare's consummate skill in crafting drama and constructing tragedy. Macbeth bears likeness to the king who usurped the crown of Scotland, as the sagas of Willard (Martin Sheen) and Kurtz (Marlon Brando) in Apocalypse Now (1979) resemble the lives of real American soldiers in Vietnam–or rather, should we say, Joseph Conrad's Belgian Congo of Heart of Darkness (1902). With Macbeth the historical code crumbles beneath the artistic text, and it seems more than coincidental that Scherman seems to have focused upon those features in the play that seminally make it dramatic: the characters' psychic states, rather than their given positions per se.

Herein lies the effort of the painting Lady Macbeth at Dungarvon, a conflated slur of a 1950s beach holiday. The historical fact is eclipsed by the force of fiction. Lady Macbeth is a type, like all types presumably–someone we know through association and partial experience. Scherman's portraits operate to jar familiarity, draw us toward these figures who fuel recognition but resist exact definition. Scherman requires the textual character, drawn from Ovid or Shakespeare, in order to describe a persona exactly, to paint that individual more than once in order to know accurately how he or she must be. They begin to take on lives of their own, perform parts of a script that has a title because it has been written, but fuses with life because the everyday, contemporary world pushes onto the s(r)cene. Until their treatment in portraiture these characters existed only in the written word or on the stage. Now, however, as they undergo a shift in medium, so too do new aspects and episodes in their experience present themselves. Such a project in painting endeavors to achieve what Merleau-Ponty defined as the "real," a pictorial becoming that quests after the "invisible whole" of a personality, a person existing exclusively in paint.

As common to so much contemporary cinema, the face is chosen as site of absolute (dis)closure, a sheer surface forced to articulate and embody a totality of experience. The sundry history of these characters, as they once lived lives of people, perhaps, are illuminated only by implication, tropes that encourage speculation, imaginative extensions beyond the frame where we might glimpse such hallucinations as "daggers of the mind." In film we are restricted by the actual running time, allowed to witness in lived time a synopsis of events. Scherman experiments with this mode of temporal presentation by creating his characters in series, permitting their appearance in more than one frame. Prompted by the paintings, discursive extensions are made, leaps through time achieved, as characters take on enduring traits, threaten to resemble "real" people seen at different periods of life. The written, spoken, or enacted narrative text furnishes applicable context, offering a scripted sequence within which to locate these characters. But who they are, of course, is dependent upon their performance, their peculiar ability to recover a certain depth of intuition and insight from their appearance, their play upon flattened surfaces. How much we know about these characters is contingent upon our readings of their image–whether in paint, on screen, or through the voice alone. As Travis, that is the man's name in Paris, Texas, must ask upon completion of his revelatory monologue: "Do you recognize me?"

Footnotes:

1. Sam Shepard and Wim Wenders, Paris, Texas, Screenplay, September 21, 1983, Scene (106), p. 176

2. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Cézanne's Doubt," in Sense and Non-Sense, translated by Herbert L. Dreyfus and Patricia A. Dreyfus, (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 13-15.

3. Sam Shepard and Wim Wenders, Paris, Texas, Screenplay, September 21, 1983, Scene (106), pp. 179-180.

4. Michael Reomer, "The Surfaces of Reality," Film Quarterly, vol. 13, no. 1 (Fall 1964), p. 15.

5. Charles Affron, Cinema and Sentiment (University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 68.

6. Ibid.

7. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act II, Scene 1, ll. 33-38.

8. Barthes remarks upon how this kind of image rejects narrative affiliation, subverting a meaning that can be described and thus generating a third, as he calls it, "obtuse" meaning: "The obtuse meaning is clearly counternarrative. Diffused, reversible, caught up in its own time, it can, if one follows it, establish only another script that is distinct from the shots, sequences, and syntagmas (both technical and narrative), an entirely different script, counterlogical but 'true.'" See Roland Barthes, "The Third Meaning: Notes on Some of Eisenstein's Stills," Artforum, vol. XI, no. 5 (January 1973), p. 49.

9. In conversation with the author, Toronto, April 4, 1994.

10. Frank Kermode discusses how Shakespeare greatly altered the substance of the historical characters he was dealing with: "The actual words of Holinshed are sometimes closely followed, but Shakespeare deals freely with his source, making Duncan old and venerable, instead of a young and weak-willed man. This is part of the general blackening of Macbeth's character....More important than any variation of detail is the change in the whole presentation of Macbeth, who is, in the Chronicles, a tough fighting man not given to self-examination or remorse...." Kermode, "Macbeth," in The Riverside Shakespeare, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), p. 1308.

Ihor Holubizky is Curator of Contemporary Art for the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Canada. He is the proud owner of a 100% Dupioni Silk suit made for J.R. Seitz, 13 September 1962, by J.L. Taylor & Co., New York.

David Moos is an art historian and curator who received his doctorate from Columbia University, New York. His most recent book, co-authored with Rainer Crone, is Jonathan Lasker: Telling the Tales of Painting; (Edition Cantz, 1993).

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