Judging from Kate's prC)cis of the opening of this book, I say, b Reader, beware.b It has all the trappings of an academic's effort to find a b not hitherto appreciatedb profound insight, at the usual cost of lumbering us with all sorts of imaginary new entities.
The effects of the b poseb are something most of us grasped and laughed about whenever we picked up a high school yearbook: the feeling of shallow, cookie-mold identity, of conformity, of clichC)d submission to clichC)d technique. The pose was NOT usually a product of the sitter but of the portraitist: The photographer decided the pose. In self-portraits, the painter/photographer also decides the pose. Compare biography with autobiography. If you have money and power enough, you as sitter can dictate the poseb&. The point: Chances are that in this book's 600+ pages you won't find anything valid that you didn't know by the time you were eighteen. But you are likely to find much that is new and invalid - actually damaging to your attempts to think clearly about your art: Note how many new terms/concepts there are in the following. More important, note how many of them are either attempts to reword a triviality in order to make it seem profound, or attempts to sell flatly bogus notions. b During this discussion the emphasis on patronal self-representation and its importance is the core...and its two most important implications are.. the shift of attention from the painter's to the sitter's part in the act of(self)portrayal, the second is a correlative shift in the conception of the primary object the portrait imitates: its primary referent object or referent is not the likeness of a pe rson but the likeness of an act,the act of posing." "Chapter one considers a system of techno-material practices and conventions,2 and 3 consider the structure and consequences of a system of social practices and conventions,4-9 consider the structure and consequences of a system of practices and conventions that govern the poses in commissioned portraits. " the portrait presents a person to the viewer" where" presents connotes display rather than presence,but that it would be better to say that the portrait presents, performs, stages not a person but a representation, and the representation not of a person but of an act of self-representation. THere follow several pages on the importance of not confusing the act of self representation with the repeated acts which society uses to classify a human within the system of the society nor with self-presence, self identity. He uses Peirce's sign-referent relations: the icon,the sign that denotes by resemblance(visual imitation),the symbol, the sign that denotes by convention(language), and the index(smoke and fire), that points to a dynamic relation between itself and its referent. The context of understanding and the fabric of cultural presupposition and the awareness of the categorical distinctions among types of sign function are necessary for their successful signification and at the same time account for the differing or changing interpretations,collectively these three things are called the interpretant.
