By what material technology, enchanted or otherwise, does the artist fix, bind or in some other way imprison the prototype within or on the surface of the index? To what extent is the recipient able to act as an agent in relation to both artist, index, and prototype, and how is such agency realised?
Jeremy Tanner - Art Agency and Art History: Portraits and Agency: A Comparative view –P 71 ( Published 2007, Blackwell Publishing Ltd)
…Gell has argued, the occurrence of such practices (the ‘magical animation of statues) does indeed depend on an innate mental module whereby we conceptualise the character of human agency in terms of a homunculus, a mind inside a body. Statues with relics activate that module and ‘animate’ the statue, but not all representational regimes exploit that particular potential of the mind in relation to images, or, even if they do seek to activate that module, necessarily use the kernel-within-the-core strategy to do so.
Jeremy Tanner - Art Agency and Art History: Portraits and Agency: A Comparative view –P 73
Portraits, whether manufactured before their death or after, served to substitute for the abbot until his successor was installed, living in the abbot’s quarters, and receiving offerings of food and incense. After the installation of the new abbot, the effigy would be removed to a portrait hall. Here, continuing to receive ritual attention and to transmit its prototypes charisma as one amongst a set of portraits representing the genealogical lineage of the monastery. As a document describing the commissioning of a portrait of one eighth-century monk asserts: “Although his wisdom dies with him, his merits will continue to exist along with his portrait.”
The Chinese Buddhist concept of a portrait implies a very particular understanding of exactly what might be involved in “preserving the merits” of a subject alongside his portrait, and thus the ways in which such images were understood to mediate their prototypes agency.
Jeremy Tanner - Art Agency and Art History: Portraits and Agency: A Comparative view –P 74
Whereas in Plato the analogy of the mirror can be used to devalue painting as a childish plaything, merely replicating superficial appearances, in Chinese thought the iconic reduplication effected through mirrors permitted its users to “discern and manipulate the underlying structures of reality.” Thus, alongside the ambivalence concerning the authenticity of portraits as a medium, there was a belief that a portrait could in some sense embody and be capable of transmitting the truth, the “living spirit” (shen) of its prototype. This was recognised in the use of the term zhen (“truth”) as an alternative for xiang (“likeness”) in describing what we would call a portrait.
Jeremy Tanner - Art Agency and Art History: Portraits and Agency: A Comparative view –P75
The ability of portraits to share in the nature of their prototypes, and thus effectively to mediate their agency, was realised through specific technologies of portrait production, which sort to elide the difference between portrait and prototype. Apart from high levels of mimetic verisimilitude realised by such details as eyes of coloured glass and rock-crystal fingernails, the prototype could be quite literally incorporated in the image in a number of different ways. The subjects own hair might be used for beard, eye-brows, and head hair. Sometimes the ashes of the deceased, and exuviae such as hair and nail clippings, were placed in the interior of the statue.
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| 15th Century Arhat Statue from Tibet |
Identity between image and prototype was realised most fully in the so-called rou-shen (flesh-body icon) or zhen-shen xiang (true body portrait), self-made indexes in which the prototype/agent formed the index through acting on his own body as patient. Attested as early as the fifth century AD, and as recently as the 1950s in Taiwan, flesh-body portraits were auto-icons produced by a sustained process of self-starvation, while seated in a meditating position, relying on a diet including kernels and cinnabar to dehydrate the body and prevent flesh and inner organs from rotting. When the subject had died he would normally be stored for a period of years, in a stone chamber or a sealed jar. If the body was still intact on retrieval the process of preservation would be completed by lacquering, either directly applied or by draping the body with lacquer-soaked cloth. Once equipped with appropriate regalia, and sometimes gilded, such images were placed in portrait halls or zhen-shen yuan “abodes of the true body”, as privileged objects of cult and pilgrimage. The terminal incorruptibility of the patriarch’s corpse was in itself evidence of spiritual enlightenment, by means of which the duality of soul and body is overcome, and the flesh body transformed into a true-body (zhen-shen), identical with the indestructible dharma-body (fa-shen).
Gormley is quite aware that his work is no mere communication of messages he might want to send. He stresses, in fact, that the process involves a necessary descent into blindness and unknowing. Unlike a sculptor who steps back and looks at his work from outside as carves it from stone, Gormley immerses himself in the material, encases himself, and buries himself alive.
What Do Pictures Want? – W.J.T. Mitchell – P259
The recipients of portraits played an active role in animating them as living presences. Both true-body portraits and their more conventional counterparts could be the objects of external animation, being clothed, fed, or ritually processed to communities facing natural calamities such as floods or drought, which the portraits were held to be able to alleviate. Animating congruence between the external relational context, within which the portraits were set, and the internal “mind-body” structure of the portrait was also effected by relics placed within portraits by their dedicators or worshippers. Some such relics established correspondences between the portrait as microcosm and the wider universe as macrocosm: cloth models of the five viscera (heart, liver, lung, kidney, spleen), not only enlivened the image but pointed towards correspondences between the viscera, the five cosmic elements (fire, metal, wood, water, earth), and the five “transcendental wisdoms”, which were the ultimate object of meditative practice, a set of relationships also invoked by the Five-Ring Pagoda, or gorinto, another common relic placed inside such statues.
Jeremy Tanner - Art Agency and Art History: Portraits and Agency: A Comparative view –P77
Like Gell’s fractal gods, such representational strategies blurred the boundaries between the individuals who formed the links in the genealogical chains that constituted Buddhist traditions, thus enhancing the sense of intimacy between worshipper and image. In the statue of Eizon, external and internal strategies of animation fuse: behind the crystal eyes is installed a small copper coil, representing the urna, invisible as an indicator of Eizon’s enlightenment, and a scroll inscribed with dharani, Sanskrit incantations esteemed as the quintessence of the Buddha’s wisdom. These devices focus the extromissive power of the statue, as transmitter of the charismatic agency of Eizon, at the point where it will meet the receptive gaze of the viewer.Jeremy Tanner - Art Agency and Art History: Portraits and Agency: A Comparative view –P 78
Portraits Agency and Greek Philosophers
Both the concept of eikon and the institution of portraiture developed out of a process of fundamental change in the status of the image from the archaic to the classical periods. The change has been classified as a shift from “the presentification of the invisible to the imitation of appearance”. The archaic image functioned as a double, the place of irruption into this world of an otherwise invisible world beyond, a real making present of an absent prototype.
Jeremy Tanner - Art Agency and Art History: Portraits and Agency: A Comparative view –P 80
According to Epicurus, all knowledge is ultimately derived from sense impressions, in the form of visual, acoustic, or tactile images. Objects emit immensely fine films of atoms, simulacra or eidola, which flow through the air and impress the sensory organs, for example the eyes, of recipients. Such images have an inherent material power or dynamis and engender a kind of atomic ripple effect, through which they reach into and ultimately affect the mind by rearranging its atomic configuration. The diathesis or mental constitution of the recipient, and the material operations he performs on these images by virtue of this diathesis, determine the ultimate effects of such images at a psychological or intellectual level.
Jeremy Tanner - Art Agency and Art History: Portraits and Agency: A Comparative view –P 81
Early Christian Portraits: The Agency of Icons
In the early Christian period, the ritual uses of portraits of Christ and the saints closely paralleled, because they were partly modelled on, the practices characteristic of pagan and philosophical sects in honouring and venerating holy men like Epirucus. In his sermon on the martyr Meletius of Antioch, John Chrysostom recalls how “everyone rejoices to put his image everywhere, on rings, goblets, dishes, and on bedroom walls, so that they can not only hear his holy discourses, but also gaze everywhere on his bodily image, thus gaining a double consolation to make up for his departure from us.”
Jeremy Tanner - Art Agency and Art History: Portraits and Agency: A Comparative view –P 84
Visitors to churches routinely showed respect to icons, by lighting candles, touching and kissing the icons, and, as need demanded, making specific requests or prayers to the saint. Like the images of Buddhist patriarchs, the icons of the primary saints of church or monastery, or of Christ and Mary, might perform a role in the political organization of their community, acting as guardians of the keys which symbolized the authority of specific officials, to whom they entrusted the keys of office in return for three genuflections and a kiss.
In terms of Gell’s art nexus, the issue of the status and character of icons may be said to have hung on whether the supposed prototype, Christ or a saint, could be held to impress their true nature on the index or image, which could thus stand in for them as an agent of the world, and reciprocally whether in venerating the material index the recipient could be truly said to act upon the prototype. According to iconoclastic thought, the only form in which Christ’s true nature could be represented, and mediated to human beings, was in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. A humanely executed icon represented only the fleshly human aspect of Christ, and claiming through it access to the prototype confused that fleshly aspect with the divine uncircumscribable godhead – both heresies.
Jeremy Tanner - Art Agency and Art History: Portraits and Agency: A Comparative view –P 85
Iconophile stories sought to minimise the gap between image and prototype, eliding the mediating figure of the artist in order to enhance the directness of the reciprocal action of prototype and recipient. A number of images were claimed to be acheiropoieta, made without the intervention of human hands, through the direct impress of the prototype. A mosaic icon representing the Virgin and the Child manifested its unity of nature with its prototype by bleeding when shot in the knee with an arrow by an Arab. Similar guarantees underwrote the authenticity of portraits of saints, strengthening the link between index and prototype to the point of identity in nature, whereby the image could take on the agency of its prototype. The saints who appeared to believers in healing-dream visions could be identified on the basis of their likeness to their icons, mutually validating both icon and vision.
Claims to such close relationships between image and prototype, and the veneration of images which it entailed, ran the risk of an accusation of idolatry.
How, if the person of the saint or Christ was not literally embodied in the image, could the icon be the medium of both the viewer’s real access to the saint and the saint’s agency in relation to the viewer? The nearest Byzantine theologians get to a solution to this apparent contradiction is in the writings of St. John of Damascus. While accepting that the divine, God the father, is invisible, uncircumscribed and without form, thus unrepresentable, John argues that God enabled ordinary human beings to experience his divinity through the person of Christ, being of one substance with the father. Icons of both Christ and the saint’s, although not embodiments of the invisible divine, nevertheless share a link of substance with it. Just as shadows are linked to the bodies that cast them, so the icon has an internal link to its prototype, only more so since it is a “more distinct portrayal of its prototype”, and thus can take on the agency of its prototype in putting demons to flight.
Jeremy Tanner - Art Agency and Art History: Portraits and Agency: A Comparative view –P88
The faithful viewer, lighting a lamp or candle before the image, activates it; the flickering flame brilliantly reflected in the gold of the halo’s and Mary’s throne brings the figures to life, as the icon casts its own light in turn back to the space of the viewer, the real emanation of Gods grace into our sinful world, mediated by Mary, the saints and the angels.
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