Anti-Portraiture

This book considers conceptual portraits, which are experimental and emphasize symbolic meanings rather than physical appearances. Some of the art in this book is conventional painting, drawing, sculpture, and photography, but most of it is innovative. * CHOICE *
This collection of essays by experts from the arts and literature provides important insights into the reconceptualization of portraiture in recent decades. Understood as critique rather than as acquiescence, the portrait—or rather the anti-portrait—becomes a terrain for reimaging the implications of new media and new questions for asserting, or abstracting, human likeness. In this nuanced anthology Fiona Johnstone and Kirstie Imber demonstrate the elasticity and resilience of portraiture not as a genre but as a politics. * Anne Collins Goodyear, Co-Director, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, USA *
Modern and contemporary artists have for some time been challenging conventions of figurative portraiture by representing their subjects in unusual ways – using, for instance, evocative objects, indexical traces or words. Factors that have contributed to this movement include the impact of psychoanalytic and post-structuralist theories that have called into question notions of a singular personal identity, the rise of photography, as well as artists’ efforts to reveal something that eludes figurative depiction. This book offers an engaging overview of ‘anti-portraiture’ with a wide-ranging general introduction and a number of excellent more sharply focused chapters by experts in the field. * Margaret Iversen, Professor Emerita, University of Essex, UK *