Interactive Portraits and Appropriating the Lost
Portraits and images of people have a purpose. They are the expression of an idea that the artist develops in a self-portrait and in a portrait of someone else vis-a-vis. The portrait creates an idea and also a confirmation. It defines the essence of the portrait subject through certain external characteristics and data like facial expression, gesture, stance, clothing and setting. The portrait places the individual into a picture. It is about the subject as the objective vehicle for significance, history, plot and responsibility. The portrait helps one achieve social stability, identity and security, as defined by of self-assuredness and self-confirmation. In a portrait, this occurs in a structured and canonized form. The portrait made by an artist is an expression of reflection and sensitivity. The painted or photographed portrait assumes, from the beginning, an unchanging status quo of the imagined: Saskia looked like this in 1641 when Rembrandt painted her, and this is what Rembrandt himself looked like as a young or older man. The portrait however, also expresses how Rembrandt saw Saskia, how he looked at her or how now, centuries later, a photographer might see his or her subject. Knowledge is collected in the portrait, as well as experience and assumption. Compared to someone's mirror image, a portrait relays the knowledge and abilities of the artist. It is not only the personal observations about the depicted individual that are being "captured" for the after-world. The style and signature of an artist are being presented, or in other words his or her subjective eye, as well as the unique characteristics, abilities, taboos and discourses of an era.
The artistic-aesthetic discourse of our time represents the attitude that it is generally understood as extremely difficult, if not impossible, to portray of people "as they are" or in other words, in a naturalistic or realistic manner, whereby despite much debate, the latter term especially still remains rather vague.
Since the beginning of the 21st century, notions of personality, character, identity, social and gender-related roles have included the understanding that a person is so multi-faceted, fractured, psychologically individualized and disassembled (and then reassembled) to portray. According to the theory, it was hardly possible to achieve little more than a naïve, and from the outset, untrue illustration in the painted portrait, which was oriented towards naturalism and realism. This type of fundamental doubt in the possibilities of the painted portrait is somewhat relatively new. Up until classic modernism, (consider for example, Otto Dix, Max Beckmann or Pablo Picasso), the belief in the ability to depict an individual and all his or her good and/or loathsome sides remained unbroken. The painted portrait entered a crisis only after the Second World War, and was no longer valued by a part of the western avant-garde as a significant art form.
It was different for photography. It had long been trusted that this medium could either intentionally or spontaneously capture a psychological situation and the significance of a person, and, that it was able to depict man's complex social and psychological condition. The documentary aspect accredited to the photographic portrait is based on the one hand, in its ability to depict physiognomy "in inimitable fidelity", as well as in its claim to depict authentic reality.
But all this really means is that we now know a person in a photograph can be recognized. Secondly, we realize that the confidence in photography's ability to faithfully reproduce is based in the particulars of so-called authenticity. In other words: photographer X met person Y at location Z and X photographed Y at this opportunity. The element of truth in this supposed authenticity has, in the era of computer animation programs, been reduced to zero. Faith in photography's element of documentation and authenticity is being greatly questioned.
How is it possible then, to do a portrait of someone in today's day and age, when neither the painted or photographed portrait can achieve what is desired? In other words, to exactly describe the facts of individuation and spirit and to enable a view into contemporary forms and processes of life? One approach, apparently possible since the fifties, is based in social research and sociology and their statistic methods of depiction.
Barbara Steppe employs the method of sociological interviews for her artistic work. She carries out personal interviews, which encourage self-reflection as well as reflection about one's own image and what it expresses. Barbara Steppe approaches her portrait project by asking a subject to write an account in a notebook over a period of seven days of how he or she spends their time - what they do and how much time they spend doing it. From the sum of their activities, Steppe deduces the central activity categories of her subjects. She calculates their proportional percentage according to the amount of time needed for the activity, and prepares a specific diagram based on this information. The starting point for the actual portraits is computer data that stores information for further processing. The artist translates this data into painting, color or black and white silk screens that recall floor plans, architectural models and functional furniture. The artist also writes a text to accompany each portrait, in which she describes the individual being presented. Modeled after the sociological report, Steppe has developed a type of picture statistic translation in her work, based on the detailed information taken from the interviewed subjects. The artist creates a picture of the habits and routines in the lives of her subjects as a socio-aesthetic construction, and portrays people based on the statements they've given about how they pass their lifetimes. This is where we see an important deflection from conventional portraiture in painting or photography that adheres to the depiction of prominent external characteristics and the description and appraisal of corresponding physiognomy, facial expressions and gestures. While on the contrary, Steppe's portraits recognize the real matrix of personality found in the daily lifestyles of her subjects, in how they spend their budget of time and in their actions and deeds. How someone looks, how he or she dresses, stands or sits is no longer depicted, but rather how the person portrayed by Barbara Steppe spends their lives, divides their time, what comprises his or her actions, needs, preferences, passions - and, how this person describes all this in his or her own words.
If most painted portraits since the Renaissance were commissioned by the nobility and other influential persons and can therefore be described as portraits of authority, then photographic portraits of the 19th and 20th centuries are real evidence and proof of bourgeois life and bourgeois order. Included of course within the "bourgeoisie of photography", are portrait concepts that depict proletarian life - as can be seen for example, in August Sander's project "People of the 20th Century".
Barbara Steppe's portraits move in a very different direction and exhibit a step in a new dimension of portraiture. Of course, hers are still works of a bourgeois era, but the character and weighting have shifted in Steppe's depictions of bourgeois life - shifted into a direction, where the individual and personal aspects of being 'engaged in doing' are not only self-confidently specified, but remain the single and only factor of expression. In fact, her portraits fulfill the irredeemable, ideal image of the bourgeoisie according to a categorical equality of treatment and the non-status of a person. This ideal notion suits Steppe's concept of portraiture in its picture statistic presentation and in how it is created in cooperation between artist and portrait subject - because the artist wants this to be an active part of her work, asks for cooperation and asks to publish the data of one's private life. Without cooperation from her subjects, Steppe's concept would be impossible to realize, nor could the texts be written by the artist to accompany the portraits if the subjects didn't play along. An element of her portrait project's methodology already occurs before the production of images and objects begins, and is composed of verbal and written communication.
On the surface, the results of this type of collaboration resemble statistics and Constructivist products: the classification of daily activities and their proportional units of time occur in color fields, in the exposition and marking of individual areas using numbers, letters, proportions and colors.
Aside from portraits where the lifestyle and preferences of the portrayed subject can be read through parceling and the registering of numbers and texts, the artist has also produced works that hint at sheer constructive pictures. This aesthetic relationship to works by the likes of Piet Mondrian or George van Tongerloo is purely superficial. Because different to the Constructivists, Steppe's approach and her method are influenced by the personal interview, by interactivity and statistical ways of presentation and in no way by pictorial structure, harmony or notions of pictorial tension as is the case with the above mentioned Constructivists. If there is any comparison in content between Steppe's art and that of the Constructivists, then it is with the alignment of her approach to the ideas of the Dutchman, Theo van Doesburg and the Poles, Wladyslaw Strzeminski und Katarzyna Kobro. These artists perceived their Constructivist approach to art as a comprehensive aesthetic and social process of design and they saw the significance in their work in the connection between art and architecture. Steppe also recognizes an optimal opportunity in the transformation of her concept of portraiture into architectural methods of design, whereby she - and this is understandable after the way history has developed since the 1920s - no longer possesses a vision of social utopia.
Picture statistics and Constructivism originated in the first two decades of the 20th century, and about at the same time. Barbara Steppe's portrait project seems, in its semantics, like a continuation of modernist ideas. However, there are fresh methods here, because the artist expands on Constructivism and statistical approach by introducing an interactive element between portraiture and its subject. In addition, Barbara Steppe achieves a method in the works' formal and conceptual system that no longer accepts being reduced to the mediums of painting or graphics.
Her works thus become integral elements of architecture and life - for example in "Transit, ein Tag Hamburg" ("Transit, One Day in Hamburg"), an installation integrated into the architecture of Hotel Wedina, encompassing the walls, floor and ceiling (Hamburg, 2002). One can understand a part of Steppe's work as sculptures but also as design and installation, when the artist for example applies surfaces of color as well as percentage data revealing the day to day activity of a portrait subject onto shelves, tables, side boards, curtains and floors that she has designed. It is important for the artist that the objects are functional. Her concept searches to establish a connection between art and the every-day - a concern, as stated above, that also occupied some Constructivists. "Kunst und Leben - eine neue Einheit" ("Art and Life - a new Entity") was one Bauhaus catchword. El Lissitzky differentiated here between the terms "art" and "design", whereby art, which he expressed with a "K" (for Kunst, Eng.: Art), should be a part of day to day life and design a part of art. Different to the notions of the 1920s, Barbara Steppe is not concerned with reinventing everyday objects. She rather appropriates the objects and gives them fresh connotations, in order to finally re-direct them into the process of the everyday. Her position is therefore more related to Pop than Constructivism. One reason may be that the artist functions in a world where, compared to the 1920s, usurpation of the world of objects is common. Mondrian's pictorial compositions are found on shower curtains now a day, and in make-up commercials, it is difficult to find something not printed with images taken from Keith Haring or Andy Warhol. Both art and design conquered the Constructivists' design dreams long ago, and in their own manner - that is, in a capitalistic way with a postmodern sense of "anything goes". In relation to this, Barbara Steppe's approach is on the one hand a legitimate stylization and valuation process. It is also however, the attempt to almost want to start from the very beginning, to secure the existent world of objects, to arrive at a self-determined relationship, at a self-defined connection and to appropriate objects through one's own facilities and in this way, to define anew. Designing furniture and applying to them fields of color and percentage data that refer to statistical material can be seen as an attempt at re-taking possession, and in this sense, as a process that creates, out of estranged and therefore lost material, something functional and personal again.
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