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- Dr Lora Koycheva

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Translations/Transpositions - Intergeneric Translation

Seminar: 11 February 2009 (Chair: Dr Cüneyt Çakirlar, more ... )

Portraiture: Faces and Stains

Dr Murat Aydemir, Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (more ... )

Abstract:

Francis Bacon’s Portrait of George Dyer in a Mirror (1967-8) refuses to offer the recognizable face of George Dyer that the title of the painting promises. Hence, the work is not so much a portrait as it is ‘about’ portraiture, suggesting a reappraisal of the genre that commences with the disarticulation of the connections between portrait, mirror, and face. That reappraisal inevitably encounters as its main resistance the formless white stains of paint on the painting’s surface. Bacon’s painterly juxtaposition of formless stains and elusive faces invites a reconsideration of portraiture as an art historical genre and a sociocultural function that circumscribes the intelligibility of the human. In my presentation, I pursue that reconsideration through a set of heuristic dialogues between Bacon’s Portrait and what I regard as other defacing ‘portraits,’ taken from literature (Proust), theory (Lacan), and pornography.

 

This page last modified 26 September, 2012 by UCL Mellon Admin