Fish & Chips

Fish & Chips or the objectification of the body and the democratisation of everyday life. Why do in portraiture the subject-matter of an image is a recognisable or well known person? such as in, for instance, in Édouard Manet's Portraying Life, at the Royal Academy of Arts, in Man Ray's Portraits, at the National Portrait Gallery, or even, or, even, in Jurgen Teller's Woo!, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.

The first obvious answer is in that it is more easier for curators to conceive exhibitions and develop their work when references about the subject are already available, contextualised, in opposition to those subjects, where, they have to engage in a more thorough research and level of inquire. The second answer will take us to meander in to the history of art. Art was(is) predominantly made for the elites. Being those religious and political, economical, intellectual. Paintings, tapestry and stained glass windows portraying the life of saints or narrating events taken from the Holy Book were used by religious orders and nobility until the 19th century to visually establish their 'word' or impose their territory on the common, on the non-educated, on the savage; it was also used as a form to visually ennobled someone or explain events in life and from everyday life. That is why most of the portraits are from people that it is more easier to identify, to refer to. It is only after that the medium used enters the process of social massification and is turned in to a commodity to be used by the whole spectrum of the social sphere. So, most of the artworks made until the 19th century were, beside religious motifs, either commissioned portraits from wealthy people or society pictures, which had no context and were posed.

However, and this is what makes Édouard Manet's work (1832-1883) to have it's latent potential attractiveness and appealing, as well as most of all the impressionist movement artists, was in that together with portraying life through a direct observation of the world surrounding them, they brought as their subject-matter into the canvas non-performative domestic scenarios, not intended for public display, embodied with psychological and emotional potentialities. The case of Manet is because he was a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism, which also coincided with the social and economic circumstance that made possible the coming of age of the photographic portrait. Man Ray's Portraits, at the National Portrait Gallery, "highlights Man Ray’s central position among the leading artists of the Dada and Surrealist movements and the significant range of contemporaries, celebrities, friends and lovers that he captured: from Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso to Kiki de Montparnasse, Lee Miller and Catherine Deneuve." Whereas, Juergen Teller (1964) in his photography portraits blurs' the boundaries between portrait and genre scenes by capturing himself not as a photographer but as a member of the community being portrayed: people from the creative industries, celebrities, fashion designers, models, musicians, etc., such as Kate Moss, No.12, Gloucestershire (2010) and Bjork and son, Iceland (1993); or sometimes bare naked or in flamboyant postures representing contemporary life, for instance.