Family portraits were always an undertaking. Each of us, same burden, same vanity, trying to find the elusive flattering angle. Recently, my sister sent a photo to the group chat displaying her side profile proudly, her prominent ridge, also our dad’s ridge, also our grandad’s, having been deftly disappeared by an injectables nurse. Sherman Sam once wrote that Hany Armanious “lovingly renders the detritus of the world.”[01] My sister’s nose had joined the great ranks of the discarded.
Many ancient sculptures are without their noses. They’re vulnerable appendages, so wear is to be expected, but they also tempted the iconoclasts, who would smash them in to deprive the statue-spirit of breath. Portrait (2020), Armanious’s contribution to Group Portrait at Phillida Reid in London, could be a tribute to those many lost prows, a kind of initiation ceremony re-enacting the Idols’ past suffering: the artist plunges their nose into a slab of wet plaster, blocking their own airways in order to retrieve and memorialise the missing piece of the image, to restore its breath. By the light sheen that catches the yellow light bouncing off its support, the nose of Portrait could be made from waxy advent-calendar chocolate. Small holes appear in its surface like huge pores and the right nostril sags slightly lower than the left, perhaps under the weight of the large mole lodged in the crease above. The average carver of 1400 BC probably has more in common with an injectables nurse than they do Armanious.
Sitting haughtily on the gallery’s windowsill, ugly and proud, the nose is the star of this group portrait. Formed through a labour of inversion and reversion, the collapsing of artist with subject that the exhibition proposes to capture is literalised, acted out in Armanious’s cast. My attraction to it could be because noses are where I’m always looking for and finding familial likeness. When I look through old photos from Mum’s childhood camping trips, where they’re all pink as hams, making sandcastles, child-Mum looks like me and young-Grandma looks like Mum. We all just swap faces.
But I alienate my family because I don’t like their dog. See how fragile these intimacies and alliances can be? We might tell ourselves that group life is about interconnection and porousness to the Other, but I often think it has more to do with mercy and capitulation. In my case, this might look like asking Ann Craven to paint a portrait of my family’s dog. She could wreathe him with a glowing Madonna’s halo like she does her own Boston terrier in Moonlight (in Moonlight, Guilford, May 27, 2020), or with some other accessory more befitting his personality, maybe a decimated soft toy, spewing out its stuffing.
Campbell Patterson’s yearly birthday gift to his mother is to hold her for as long as he can physically manage. Over many years of the iterative performance, Lifting my mother for as long as I can 2006–2022, included here, the pair have accrued one hour, fourteen minutes and forty seconds of holding. The work shares some sentiments with those amateur self-portraiture projects, oddly enduring as a cultural form, where the daily images are spliced together breakneck, compressing a decade into a headshot. As documents of self, they are mediocre. All they really capture about a person is their changing hair-styles. I watched one, ignoring the face altogether; I was absorbed by the shelves in the background, where objects, adjusted minutely over the months, writhed like Jan Švankmajer stop-motions. A small yin-yang print remained unmoved on the shelf for about eight years, until 2020, when the books were taken away to make room for office equipment. Filmed in front of the same wretched floral curtains and by the same standard-definition home video camera, Patterson’s work reveals no worldly attachments other than the one to his mother, this ritual performance they complete together, and perhaps, too, their ageing in unison. Seeing her foetal, him sometimes heroic and sometimes spent, I think of Gillian Rose on love: “The woman is not the mother, the man is not the son. No folie à deux, the relationship has a third partner: the work.”[02]
Patterson’s labour of love finds a mirror in Joanna Piotrowska’s photography, though I’ve always thought sons have an easier time with their mothers than do daughters. Mothers overcompensate with sons, pour their love for maleness into this one specimen with whom there was never the expectation of equality. Between women, the work of the relationship means contending with the world’s hatred of the feminine. Is that not what stews in Untitled (2021)? A slightly spiteful love passes between these two young beauties gazing at one another, parted violently and irreparably into a diptych. Shot in large format, black and white, Piotrowska’s images have the concentrated melodrama of a film still; the Untitled girls are Anna and Claudia in L’aventurra, Alma and Elizabet in Persona, acting out the gestures from self-defence manuals and psychotherapeutic modalities the artist has long used in her work. Families are microhabitats of cultural discontent and flows of power. Protagonists gripping at each other, it is often ambiguous whether the relation pictured by Piotrowska is one of comfort, control or combat. What is always certain is the interlockedness of the bodies. Group life, unlike noses, can’t be cast aside.
[01] Sherman Sam, ‘Hany Armanious,’ Artforum, 12 April 2016.
[02] Gillian Rose, Love’s Work (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), 140.
Header image: Ebun Sodipo, General Partition (detail), 2022, digitally printed PVC curtains, steel, 195 x 98 cm
