Juan Ford’s recent paintings continue his interest in Phrenology and Physiognomy by an investigation into illumination, perception, ruin and difference. Illumination is literally presented in three separate paintings entitled Beacon that contain inverted light bulbs with unique filaments and sockets and Unenlightenment an inverted wall-mounted electric chandelier. Perception is addressed in Ignorance, a horizontal anamorphism and an anamorphoscope (a vertical shinny cylinder) that reflects a coherent image of Ford—arms folded wearing a pig’s head; whilst ruin is expressed by ten numbered paintings, each entitled Husk that depicts the damaged, disembodied heads of classical Roman statues. Ford addresses difference in specific ways, such as the variously shaped and proportioned light bulbs, the disparity between the incoherent anamorphism and its coherent counterpart as well as the scale of the heads and their various pedestal supports.
Providing a departure from Ford’s signature large portraits of living subjects, these small, exquisitely executed works of ancient individuals present an opportunity for intimacy. Close inspection reveals that apart from Ford’s representation of intentional or accidental injury to the statues, which he viewed at the Capitoline museums in Rome earlier this year, some of the faces bear small indentations or pock holes that may be read as symptomatic of disease. I was reminded of the surface features of Louis I. Kahn’s buildings, which reflected his own pock-faced skin and the aesthetic dimension of these blemishes.1 Ford’s depiction of intricate facial flaws in the Husk paintings is a return perhaps to his Phrenology (Abstraction #8) 2004, which accurately depicts numerous brown moles growing on the subject’s face and shaved head. It is in this way that he challenges the notion of perfection. 2
Husk 1 differs dramatically from the other photo-realist portrayals. With its calm blue background and slightly tilted head it is reminiscent of portrayals of the Virgin Mary. However, this portrait of the ideal woman is tainted with signs of mutation, for Ford has smoothed down the woman’s nose, the nostrils are absent and the nasal cartilage slides into a protruding anomaly above the thin upper lip as though molded from soft clay. Indeed, her visage bears the marks of what might be read as thumb and finger depressions hinting at the malleability of the human face by human intervention. A distinct line or crack on the man’s nose in Husk 7 suggests that the nose has been replaced. Conversely, it looks counterfeit and prosthetic.
Given that Ford has depicted the heads with damaged noses, it is appropriate that I mention Peter Greenaway’s 1987 film The Belly of an Architect. In a scene that occurs towards the end of the film Stourley Kracklite (Brian Dennehy), an American architect who is supervising a Roman expedition of the work of French architect Etiene-Louis Boullée, discovers a man using a chisel and hammer to remove the noses from statues that surround the Villa. Kracklite inspects two large noses from within the bag that hangs from the man’s shoulder. The man, who communicates only in Italian, which Kracklite doesn’t understand, wipes his nose and continues his task. Various references to the nose throughout the film is a trope of Kracklite’s emasculation through the pain and anguish he experiences from a tumor growing in his lower abdomen and knowledge that his wife Louisa’s (Chloe Webb) is having an affair with a rival Italian architect.
Of course the symbolism of the nose has been well documented throughout history and since it is a significant feature of the human face, the shape or length of the nose was often referred to in Physiognomy as denoting behavioral characteristics. To have a pug nose meant that you were lowly or coarse (animal or pig-like), however a pointy nose meant that your perceptions were sharp and accurate. It was also thought that smashing the nose on a statue would kill that person’s soul. The Husk portraits and the image of Ford wearing a pig’s head are linked thematically through the shape of the distorted noses. Both defile human appearance.
However in Ford’s paintings it is not only the noses, but also the chin and other parts of the individual’s head that are missing, eroding established ways of reading the face in pseudo-scientific practices such as Phrenology or Physiognomy. However, even without these identifying features we are still able to read despair, serenity, pain and anguish into the faces.
Since much of Ford’s oeuvre has dealt with portraiture and perspective developed during the Renaissance, which might be read as a commentary on contemporary perceptions enabled by advanced imaging technologies, the faces presented in this manner challenge readings of identity based on biological or inherent characteristics.3 His paintings, which reveal superficial imperfections instigated by human intervention or eroded through time implies that it is exogenous, rather than endogenous or internal causes that determines identity.
Although the subjects of these new works evince Neo-Classicism, the Renaissance and Anamorphism, which was used during the Enlightenment by artists to disrupt the orderliness and expectations of viewing a painting, his work is most certainly an engagement with contemporary image manipulation that challenges the notion of a coherent and perfect body. In anamorphic images, the subject of the image is hidden within elongated forms and emerges only when viewed from a certain perspective, which alludes to the fact that it is perspective, which fools the eye. Anamorphosis was made possible only by the use of mathematic and geometric equations in order to distort and disrupt usual representations. The presence of an anamorphic image in a painting required that the spectator shift position to the side of the frame in order to see the image, thus emphasizing the affect of technology on the perception of the viewer.
Although Juan has previously presented anamorphic forms in this way, particularly in Portrait of Alan and Golaith (Portrait of Alan Fels) (2004) and polar anamorphism in Alpha (2001), Omega (2001) and Motive and Motif (2001), the inclusion of an anamorphoscope for this exhibition reveals Ford’s desire to expose the device which enables normative perception and the significance of the revealed image to the thematic concepts of the exhibition.
In Ignorance the fluid, incomprehensible anamorphism corrupts the notion of containment and symmetry afforded the reflected anamorphoscopic image, however, the subject of this image—a human pig hybrid is as defiled and monstrous as the anamorphism. I am reminded here of Patricia Piccinini’s The Young Family (2002), which depicts a family of human porcine chimeras. Piccinini’s piece alerts us to the biomedical technology of xenotransplantion, especially the transfer of biomaterials from pigs to humans and the disturbances that might occur to human morphology and identity. Piccinini challenges the hierarchical place of humanity in the human animal divide by creating a tableau and morphological thought experiment in which both human and animal coalesce.
However potent in terms of its ability to refer to developments in contemporary biomedicine, Ford presents the pig’s head as a grotesque mask, evoking Medieval carnivàle and the desire of individuals to enact the part-human, part-monstrous beings that inhabited their dark psyche. According to Mary Russo ‘The grotesque body is opposed to the classical body, which is monumental, static, closed and sleek, corresponding to the aspirations of bourgeois individualism; the grotesque body is connected to the rest of the world.’4 By masking the human as animal, Ford embraces difference whilst simultaneously inverting the hierarchical biological and social order. The blemishes and damaged features depicted on the disembodied heads are like the pig’s mask; both deride any notion of a complete and perfect human body, ironically it is also those defects which affords us our humanity. Paradoxically, humanist individualism, demonstrated by Ford in his selection of Roman heroes and deities reflects the contemporary desire by individuals to become other and presumably better than they are through actual or virtual image manipulation.
An interesting counterpart to Ford’s Husk paintings is Stelarc’s recent Partial Head (2006) project, which comprised fragmented tissue-engineered eyelids, nose, lips and chin.5 Whilst Ford uses the technologies of painting and photography to reproduce sculptural realism and representations of human identity eroded by time and human intervention, Stelarc’s Partial Head, possible only through the temporal deterioration of a cadaver or through biomedical construction, points to the malleability of human and animal cells in the construction of a less than human and more than human form. Whilst Stelarc’s Partial Head suggests the possibility of facial reconstruction through the use of tissue engineering or transplant technologies, thus supporting the notion of a coherent, complete subject for identification, Ford’s paintings applaud the damaged heads in an embrace of our humanity, which is revealed as less than perfect. Aesthetically, both Stelarc’s tissue-engineered Partial Head and Ford’s Husk paintings espouse the incomplete and perhaps imperfect becoming that has been theorized as the post-human modified body.
The ruin and inversion of light in Ford’s paintings serves to turn the Enlightenment’s concern with rationality and order on its head. Indeed his work reflects a fall from grace of secular humanism, echoing perhaps John Carroll’s lament ‘We live amidst the ruins of the great, five-hundred year epoch of humanism. Around us is that ‘colossal wreck’. Our culture is a flat expanse of rubble’.6 1. Kahn’s face was burnt in a fire.
http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/kiosk/egyptian/ancient-egypt/index.php
2. Phrenology and Physiognomy have been expressed in Ford’s previous portraits.
3. Computer imaging technologies enable photographs of human faces to be morphed together to provide hybrid faces that reveal the similarities between faces and which enable dead stars to be reanimated and sutured into contemporary film-making. They generally fragment facial features.
4. Mary Russo, ‘Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory’, In: Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, (ed) Katie Conboy, Nado Medina and Sarah Stanbury, New York, Columbia University Press, p.325
5. Stelarc’s Partial Head project was exhibited at the Imagine Exhibition, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Templestowe, Victoria in July, 2006.
6. John Carroll, The Wreck of Western Culture: Humanism Revisited, Scribe Publications, Melbourne, 2004, Prologue
Julie Clarke (Copyright), July 2006
Providing a departure from Ford’s signature large portraits of living subjects, these small, exquisitely executed works of ancient individuals present an opportunity for intimacy. Close inspection reveals that apart from Ford’s representation of intentional or accidental injury to the statues, which he viewed at the Capitoline museums in Rome earlier this year, some of the faces bear small indentations or pock holes that may be read as symptomatic of disease. I was reminded of the surface features of Louis I. Kahn’s buildings, which reflected his own pock-faced skin and the aesthetic dimension of these blemishes.1 Ford’s depiction of intricate facial flaws in the Husk paintings is a return perhaps to his Phrenology (Abstraction #8) 2004, which accurately depicts numerous brown moles growing on the subject’s face and shaved head. It is in this way that he challenges the notion of perfection. 2
Husk 1 differs dramatically from the other photo-realist portrayals. With its calm blue background and slightly tilted head it is reminiscent of portrayals of the Virgin Mary. However, this portrait of the ideal woman is tainted with signs of mutation, for Ford has smoothed down the woman’s nose, the nostrils are absent and the nasal cartilage slides into a protruding anomaly above the thin upper lip as though molded from soft clay. Indeed, her visage bears the marks of what might be read as thumb and finger depressions hinting at the malleability of the human face by human intervention. A distinct line or crack on the man’s nose in Husk 7 suggests that the nose has been replaced. Conversely, it looks counterfeit and prosthetic.
Given that Ford has depicted the heads with damaged noses, it is appropriate that I mention Peter Greenaway’s 1987 film The Belly of an Architect. In a scene that occurs towards the end of the film Stourley Kracklite (Brian Dennehy), an American architect who is supervising a Roman expedition of the work of French architect Etiene-Louis Boullée, discovers a man using a chisel and hammer to remove the noses from statues that surround the Villa. Kracklite inspects two large noses from within the bag that hangs from the man’s shoulder. The man, who communicates only in Italian, which Kracklite doesn’t understand, wipes his nose and continues his task. Various references to the nose throughout the film is a trope of Kracklite’s emasculation through the pain and anguish he experiences from a tumor growing in his lower abdomen and knowledge that his wife Louisa’s (Chloe Webb) is having an affair with a rival Italian architect.
Of course the symbolism of the nose has been well documented throughout history and since it is a significant feature of the human face, the shape or length of the nose was often referred to in Physiognomy as denoting behavioral characteristics. To have a pug nose meant that you were lowly or coarse (animal or pig-like), however a pointy nose meant that your perceptions were sharp and accurate. It was also thought that smashing the nose on a statue would kill that person’s soul. The Husk portraits and the image of Ford wearing a pig’s head are linked thematically through the shape of the distorted noses. Both defile human appearance.
However in Ford’s paintings it is not only the noses, but also the chin and other parts of the individual’s head that are missing, eroding established ways of reading the face in pseudo-scientific practices such as Phrenology or Physiognomy. However, even without these identifying features we are still able to read despair, serenity, pain and anguish into the faces.
Since much of Ford’s oeuvre has dealt with portraiture and perspective developed during the Renaissance, which might be read as a commentary on contemporary perceptions enabled by advanced imaging technologies, the faces presented in this manner challenge readings of identity based on biological or inherent characteristics.3 His paintings, which reveal superficial imperfections instigated by human intervention or eroded through time implies that it is exogenous, rather than endogenous or internal causes that determines identity.
Although the subjects of these new works evince Neo-Classicism, the Renaissance and Anamorphism, which was used during the Enlightenment by artists to disrupt the orderliness and expectations of viewing a painting, his work is most certainly an engagement with contemporary image manipulation that challenges the notion of a coherent and perfect body. In anamorphic images, the subject of the image is hidden within elongated forms and emerges only when viewed from a certain perspective, which alludes to the fact that it is perspective, which fools the eye. Anamorphosis was made possible only by the use of mathematic and geometric equations in order to distort and disrupt usual representations. The presence of an anamorphic image in a painting required that the spectator shift position to the side of the frame in order to see the image, thus emphasizing the affect of technology on the perception of the viewer.
Although Juan has previously presented anamorphic forms in this way, particularly in Portrait of Alan and Golaith (Portrait of Alan Fels) (2004) and polar anamorphism in Alpha (2001), Omega (2001) and Motive and Motif (2001), the inclusion of an anamorphoscope for this exhibition reveals Ford’s desire to expose the device which enables normative perception and the significance of the revealed image to the thematic concepts of the exhibition.
In Ignorance the fluid, incomprehensible anamorphism corrupts the notion of containment and symmetry afforded the reflected anamorphoscopic image, however, the subject of this image—a human pig hybrid is as defiled and monstrous as the anamorphism. I am reminded here of Patricia Piccinini’s The Young Family (2002), which depicts a family of human porcine chimeras. Piccinini’s piece alerts us to the biomedical technology of xenotransplantion, especially the transfer of biomaterials from pigs to humans and the disturbances that might occur to human morphology and identity. Piccinini challenges the hierarchical place of humanity in the human animal divide by creating a tableau and morphological thought experiment in which both human and animal coalesce.
However potent in terms of its ability to refer to developments in contemporary biomedicine, Ford presents the pig’s head as a grotesque mask, evoking Medieval carnivàle and the desire of individuals to enact the part-human, part-monstrous beings that inhabited their dark psyche. According to Mary Russo ‘The grotesque body is opposed to the classical body, which is monumental, static, closed and sleek, corresponding to the aspirations of bourgeois individualism; the grotesque body is connected to the rest of the world.’4 By masking the human as animal, Ford embraces difference whilst simultaneously inverting the hierarchical biological and social order. The blemishes and damaged features depicted on the disembodied heads are like the pig’s mask; both deride any notion of a complete and perfect human body, ironically it is also those defects which affords us our humanity. Paradoxically, humanist individualism, demonstrated by Ford in his selection of Roman heroes and deities reflects the contemporary desire by individuals to become other and presumably better than they are through actual or virtual image manipulation.
An interesting counterpart to Ford’s Husk paintings is Stelarc’s recent Partial Head (2006) project, which comprised fragmented tissue-engineered eyelids, nose, lips and chin.5 Whilst Ford uses the technologies of painting and photography to reproduce sculptural realism and representations of human identity eroded by time and human intervention, Stelarc’s Partial Head, possible only through the temporal deterioration of a cadaver or through biomedical construction, points to the malleability of human and animal cells in the construction of a less than human and more than human form. Whilst Stelarc’s Partial Head suggests the possibility of facial reconstruction through the use of tissue engineering or transplant technologies, thus supporting the notion of a coherent, complete subject for identification, Ford’s paintings applaud the damaged heads in an embrace of our humanity, which is revealed as less than perfect. Aesthetically, both Stelarc’s tissue-engineered Partial Head and Ford’s Husk paintings espouse the incomplete and perhaps imperfect becoming that has been theorized as the post-human modified body.
The ruin and inversion of light in Ford’s paintings serves to turn the Enlightenment’s concern with rationality and order on its head. Indeed his work reflects a fall from grace of secular humanism, echoing perhaps John Carroll’s lament ‘We live amidst the ruins of the great, five-hundred year epoch of humanism. Around us is that ‘colossal wreck’. Our culture is a flat expanse of rubble’.6 1. Kahn’s face was burnt in a fire.
http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/kiosk/egyptian/ancient-egypt/index.php
2. Phrenology and Physiognomy have been expressed in Ford’s previous portraits.
3. Computer imaging technologies enable photographs of human faces to be morphed together to provide hybrid faces that reveal the similarities between faces and which enable dead stars to be reanimated and sutured into contemporary film-making. They generally fragment facial features.
4. Mary Russo, ‘Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory’, In: Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, (ed) Katie Conboy, Nado Medina and Sarah Stanbury, New York, Columbia University Press, p.325
5. Stelarc’s Partial Head project was exhibited at the Imagine Exhibition, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Templestowe, Victoria in July, 2006.
6. John Carroll, The Wreck of Western Culture: Humanism Revisited, Scribe Publications, Melbourne, 2004, Prologue
Julie Clarke (Copyright), July 2006
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