The following is an abstract of a paper presented at the Art & Authenticity Conference, ANU Canberra, 3 November, 2006.

"But it doesn’t look like me": On Authenticity, the Portrait, and Diaspora

Conventions of portraiture claim referentiality as the element that differentiates portraiture from all other artistic genres. Informing the traditional portrait is the relationship of its imagery to the human original that lies outside its frame.
Traditionally, the role of a portrait has been to authenticate presence – whether through creating a likeness or symbolic representation – by ‘capturing’ someone’s essential truth, the ‘inner life’ of a particular human subject. It has also served as a vehicle for interpreting, memorialising, and fixing a person’s identity or social status. But how does portraiture function artistically and culturally when the identity of human subjects is in flux, or when their grounding in national, cultural or social contexts shifts as the result of diaspora and migration, for example?
Recently, portraiture has been used by contemporary artists as a site for exploring subjectivity and representation in ways that question those notions of authenticity that have defined the conventions of this genre. In so doing, such work proposes portraiture as a cultural area of what Ernst Van Alphen refers to as habit and debate rather than a purely historical artistic genre.
Ultimately, it is the viewer’s experience of the portrait that can profit from such repositioning of portraiture for, like diaspora itself, it becomes the place of another kind of authenticity, one that is, as R. Radhakrishnan has observed, “situated alongside the phenomenon of relationality and the politics of representation.” This paper will explore the concept of authenticity not as ‘origin’ but as a relational experience in the context of the relationship between portraiture and diasporic subjectivities and consciousness.

© Gali Weiss, School of Communication, Culture and Languages, Victoria University