The portrait: designating an approach, a linguistically double-sided image?

The portrait is a linguistically double-sided image – I suggest calling it an oral object –based on a discursive oral and visual meeting between Artist and Model. A meeting that represents both the Model’s and the Artist’s discourse. The meeting is founded on an approach, and designates both Model’s and Artist’s unique history and discourse, which are social. In their meeting, in their conversation, the oral object that is a portrait will be produced.

Etymologically, it’s interesting to note that the French composite word ”portrait” is derived from the written ”pourtraire (pour (for, to) and traire (pull, write (also milk)), thus showing that both the approach and the referral are implicitly inscribed in the expression.

To do a portrait is about investigating the human subject’s discourse and its approach to the Other, as well as the Name and its Place, as I relate to it. Not the name as status (the name as emblem), but the name explored in an etymological sense - the subject and its historical meaning.

The Name and its Place designates the person’s subject, the place from which it speaks (thus the approach), and this is what I inscribe in the colours and materials that become a portrait. The discourse is from my point of view both a social place – an accordance – and a presence (a speaking existence).

The visual image, the painted Portrait of the Kalundborg Man Tommy Dinesen (2006) designates in a manner of speaking a number of different subjects inscribed in the painting, which is to say both the Model’s and the Artist’s discourses, and that which these discourses refer to and designate, such as the linguistic Other and the Metaphor.
Thus in this perspective this present portrait also represents a strong Metaphor: Tommy Dinesen is this strong Metaphor, and the Metaphor mentioned here refers to a linguistic Construction that “reaches beyond” the identity, and means that the subjects have a place to be.

This Construction demonstrates a number of aspects, meanings and functions; for instance, it gives the subject a place to be and a place from which to speak. The effect is to make it possible for the subject – in relation to this Construction – to deconstruct an imaginary image, at the same time as it (in the approach to the Other) constitutes another linguistic image, but inscribed in a symbolised order.

When I painted the portrait of Tommy Dinesen, I was interested in meeting the human subject Tommy Dinesen and his discourse, not just Mayor Tommy Dinesen as we know him from the media. I heard a number of key words in his discourse, and they opened the way for references, such as the expression the meaning, which tells us something of his firm view of history. If you look closely, this key word, among other value expressions, is inscribed in one side of the portrait, and I wrote further on it, in my way inscribing it in the other side of the portrait.
- by Berit Heggenhougen-Jensen

Note:
The manuscript : The portrait: designating an approach, a linguistically double-sided image? refers to the sketch and painting Portrait of the Kalundborg Man, Tommy Dinesen (2006) illustrated in the catalogue produced by the Museum of National History at Frederiksborg Castle, (Fredriksborgmuseet) in Denmark, in connection with the exhibition The Portrait Now! http://portraet.nu and http://www.frederiksborgslot.dk. The sketch and painted portrait will be exhibited here from May 4 to July 29, 2007, after which the exhibition will tour Scandinavia in 2007-2008, showen in Hafnarborg, Hafnarfjorður, Island; Stockholm National Museum’s National portrait collection, (Statens Porträttsamling, Nationalmuseum), Sweden; Amos Anderson’s Museum of Art (Amos Andersons Konstmuseum), Helsinki, Finland; and the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History (Norsk Folkemuseum), Oslo, Norway.

-translated by Patricia Lunddahl.