Michael Newman's essay Decapitations: The portrait, the anti-portrait... and what comes after? has been published in Anti-Portraiture: Challenging the Limits of the Portrait (edited by Fiona Johnstone & Kristie Imber; Bloomsbury Visual Arts, UK). Here, Newman considers Gardner's Creole Portraits III series in the context of expanded portraiture that originates from the trace left by the subject.
Bloomsbury Visual Arts describes the publication as follows:
"The portrait has historically been understood as an artistic representation of a human subject. Its purpose was to provide a visual or psychological likenesses or an expression of personal, familial or social identity; it was typically associated with the privileged individual subject of Western modernity. Recent scholarship in the humanities and social sciences however has responded to the complex nature of twenty-first century subjectivity and proffered fresh conceptual models and theories to analyse it.
The contributors to Anti-Portraiture examine subjectivity via a range of media including sculpture, photography and installation, and make a convincing case for an expanded definition of portraiture. By offering a timely reappraisal of the terms through which this genre is approached, the chapter authors volunteer new paradigms in which to consider selfhood, embodiment and representation. In doing so they further this exciting academic debate and challenge the curatorial practices and acquisition policies of museums and galleries."
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