The most exact self-representation here comes in a recent series of holographic self-portraits by Chuck Close. Close poses himself in four basic positions: full front, profile, and two three-quarters profiles, left and right. As you move from one piece to the next, Close's head turns toward the next pose; when you get to the end you've seen it from every angle except the rear. The depiction is of course, very exact, and the pose utterly neutral, even uncommunicative. You know everything and nothing about this person.
Inventories are a common theme. Bruce Cannon's piece Ten Things I Can Count On reduces life beneath even statistics, to numbers that move either up or down, and thus can be counted as a child would count. Titles of some of the ten counting machines include Breaths I Have Left, and Breaths I Have Taken. In a complex machine nearby, Cannon presents the evidence that he is living: A red light flashes on and off, approximating Cannon's heartbeat, and a tilting scale slowly counts off the years of his life, one degree per year. Cannon is required to call the piece via modem once a month to keep the light flashing; otherwise, it shuts off forever.
Natalie Bookchin offers an exhaustive self-portrait via a CD-ROM titled Databank of the Everyday. Its various submenues catalog video clips of Bookchin's "Nervous Habits" (brushing teeth, biting her fingernails), "Angry Moments" (slamming a hand on a table, ripping a Rolodex card), and "Grooming" (applying deodorant, clipping her fingernails). The clips feel neither voyeuristic nor boring, or maybe they're a little of both -- I had little curiosity about the person depicted, but I kept clicking and clicking to see more. Because this is a portrait of a very specific person, but viewed only through her commonplace activities, it reduces her to a type -- upper-middle-class working woman -- even as it obsessively catalogs her activities.
Other artists here aim straight for types, looking possibly to draw the individual out of the generic. Do-Ho Suh's Who Am We? is wallpaper made from thousands of tiny Korean yearbook photos: Each specific face could be Suh -- and in fact, one of them is -- but seen from any distance beyond a couple of inches from the wall, they blur into an all-over salt-and-pepper gray. The individual disappears in the vast population surrounding him.
Doug Kornfeld's similarly titled web page Who Are You? creates a self-portrait of everybody who interacts with it. Kornfeld has generated a variety of icons using the basic bathroom-door symbols for man and woman: elongating them, giving them bellies or broad shoulders or huge heads. Viewers are invited to choose an icon which represents themselves, and then write comments about their choice. A fascinating psychological survey results, as people project their feelings about themselves and others onto these bland figures. The first comment accompanying a tall, thin female figure is "I'm a bicth [sic]. I like to dance to 'Y.M.C.A.'" A thin guy figure gets "I love my chicken legs. I love my pipe cleaner arms." The rounder figures, male and female, generate comments like "fertility goddess" and sad complaints about someone's inability to shed pounds. A lot of emotion is unleashed by this subtle piece.
A piece hidden away in the back corner is a self-portrait in reverse. A video installation by Mexico City artist Minerva Cuevas, Drunker shows an attractive, well-dressed, and coifed person politely obliterating herself with tequila. (Maybe she was driven to drink by the pressure underlying the tortured self-depictions surrounding her.) As she drinks, she writes down, in Spanish, the reasons why she's drinking, each item followed by the simple lie "No estoy borracho [I'm not drunk]." The sheets of paper she wrote on hang in the gallery, allowing us to learn that she drinks para pensar, para cantar, para no mentir, para hablar con dios, para amar. By the end of the hour-long video, she's drunk herself unconscious. Her act of confession leaves her depleted, absorbed, no more.
