While portraiture, especially self-portraiture, was a confident expression of artistic sovereignty and individuality during the Renaissance, it became an expression of increasing insecurity in the late 20th century. In the face of a relentlessly accelerating, hyper-economized world in which the individual is losing significance daily, the question arises as to how one can still adequately depict this fragile identity.
When we speak of self-portraiture, we associate it with a specific expectation strongly influenced by Romantic art theory, in which art was considered "an expression of the artistic personality and the inner truth of the subject."
In the self-portrait, the reconstruction of external appearance is combined with the portrayal of inner feelings. We associate this with a special form of immediacy, since for us the face is not only the place where a person reveals their innermost self, but also because our image of the artist is shaped by the idea that their special social position makes them an almost exemplary figure.
Jean-Claude Schmitt sees the face "as a sign of identity, as a bearer of expression, and ultimately as a site of representation in the literal sense as a depiction as well as in the symbolic sense of representation."
What does it mean, then, when an artist like Wolfgang Grinschgl breaks up and distorts the physiognomy of his face, deforms himself, and presents himself as undergoing uncanny mutations? Are these works merely about the subjective representation of an individual, or also about a depiction of our time?
Every self-portrait always reflects societal conceptions of the subject. Following the discussion about the “irretrievable self” at the turn of the century, the discourse on the disappearance of the subject reached its climax in the 1960s.
Poststructuralism radically rejected traditional conceptions of subjectivity, artistic authorship, and originality.
Not only were the “end of painting,” the “ruins of the museum,” and the “death of the author” discussed, but also the “end of man” in Michel Foucault’s famous dictum: “Man disappears like a face in the sand on the seashore.”
Jean Baudrillard constructed “multiplicities of self” and diagnosed a “fractal subject” that “instead of transcending itself in favor of a purpose or a whole that transcends itself, splinters into a multitude of miniature egos, all resembling one another […].” This is where Wolfgang Grinschgl's exploration of his own image begins. Grinschgl draws on the Renaissance frontal portrait, which places the artist in a confrontational relationship with the viewer, but the mirror of self-reflection is shattered, casting countless versions and fragmentary views of the face back at us. Just as we all wear different masks and develop different self-images in our social interactions, Grinschgl creates not just one image of himself, but countless images.
Grinschgl draws on the frontal portrait of the Renaissance, which places the artist in a confrontational relationship with the viewer, but the mirror of self-reflection is shattered, reflecting countless versions and fragmentary views of the face. Between his face and the viewer's gaze, however, he always introduces an additional layer, a membrane that either conceals his face or protects it from the viewer's direct gaze. From an amorphous mass of color, a face emerges, accentuated in white, as something transitory, heralding the disappearance of the subject and the fragmentation of identity. "The face has a great future, but only if it is destroyed and dissolved," write Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari about the politics of the face. They no longer understand the face as a natural given, but as a product of cultural development and thus as an expression of power relations. The many faces of Wolfgang Grinschgl exhibit forms of impairment, deformation, and dissolution, which, in the sense of an open artwork, can certainly be interpreted as traces of sociopolitical power relations. Wolfgang Grinschgl's self-portraits are records of a dissolution, an incipient annihilation, in which the painterly accentuations of the dark facial openings represent a final point of reference, a last resistance against disappearance. To what extent the portraits might be a representation of his inner self, a depiction of psychological processes, or even an alienation of his self, remains an open question.
Whether truth or fiction, reflection or invention, as a condensed image of humanity, his face represents the external view of the "exhausted self," characterized by anxieties, compulsions, and paralyzing feelings of exhaustion and inadequacy.
And it poses the question of how a representation of humanity is even possible in a posthuman world.
Roman Grabner, Universalmuseum Joanneum, 2015
