Some modern artists are so obsessed with the human face that they can’t stop messing with it, imposing big pink dots, scrubbing out eyes, or sawing it off altogether. Is this art’s stand against facial identity? By Amy Binding
Last year the Dutch artist Willem Popelier made news after what started out as a routine visit to his local computer store turned into something more peculiar. The 29-year-old was in the midst of a long-term project entitled “Showroom”, which involved him collecting webcam photos of strangers he discovered on public computers. Cruising in a well-known computer showcase store, Popelier stumbled across almost a hundred shots and two movies of a pair of teenage young girls striking poses, blowing kisses and mugging up for the camera, famous for 15megabytes, but unaware that their images would ever be made public, let alone exhibited as art in a gallery in a big city.
In an act that most people would perhaps have thought twice about, Popelier downloaded the photos, took them home, and superimposed large pink circles over the girls’ faces. The new images went on to form a strand of his project entitled “Showroom Girls”, and were exhibited in Amsterdam’s Foam museum in the summer of 2011. On his website, Popelier wrote that the webcam pictures where “made by true Digital Narcissists.” The American gossip website Gawker duly asked whether this “might be the creepiest project ever.”
But what, exactly, was Popelier doing? What did he intend by his altered images, and the brutal erasure of the girls’ faces? Was the project some comment on celebrity culture in the social media age, or was it about voyeurism, exhibitionism and the supposed self-obsession of contemporary youth?
His spotty girls are only the latest and most eyecatching examplars of what happens when artists choose to create new images from the faces of unsuspecting subjects, real or imagined, current or historical, alive or dead. “Obliterism” you could call it: the act of altering, masking or just annihilating the face of a subject within the image, and as a consequence, the identity originally attached to it.
Popelier’s most obvious antecedent – the godfather of the face-spotting – is John Baldessari. The American conceptual artist is often labeled as the pioneer of creating new identities and personas using found imagery and anonymous, unowned works, stripping them of their previous stories, and creating an entirely new image, often with only the use of an dot placed over the face. Baldessari believed that covering the faces with a sticker “took the power away from them in someway, they became more generic.”
Baldessari’s method of applying candy-coloured dots was radically simple, and so is Scottish artist and 1996 Turner Prize winner Douglas Gordon’s. He applies a process of accelerated deterioration to his work (the effective opposite of Baldessari’s approach), in a sense extracting the subject’s identity through the face, rather than masking it. The burning, scratching and ripping of iconic images of superstars gives the celebrities in question a new identity; when you look at Gordon’s image of James Dean, you’re no longer able to think of James Dean, and see instead Gordon’s own intervention in the image: the obliteration itself becomes the focus of the work.