Posted on behalf of Wendy Duff:

Portraiture in the Age of Electrical McLuhan
Speaker: Lilly Koltun
Wednesday, May 25, 2005 5:30pm – 7:30pm
*
McLuhan Program in Culture & Technology ** Faculty of Information Studies* *
Claude T. Bissell Building *
* 140 St. George St.*
*University of Toronto *

When Marshall McLuhan published Understanding Media in 1964, he assigned 
the artist a re-demptive role as one who “builds...Noah’s arks for 
facing the change that is at hand” in the anxi-ety-inducing subversion 
of the mechanical age by the electrical or information age. What was 
happening in the 1950s and 1960s that might have led him to that high 
opinion of artists, and over forty years later, can we say if he is 
still right or relevant? How did artists negotiate the me-dium as 
message then and do they emerge today with their bodies interfacing with 
media like “an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull and 
it nerves outside its hide”?

Portraiture serves well to focus an exploration of answers to these 
questions as McLuhan framed his metaphors around the corporeal body, 
claiming that communications media were extensions of the eye, ear, hand 
and foot, and the sense perceptions of the whole body. The impact of new 
media was to revolutionize macro- and microcosmic cultural and economic 
interaction not through their capacities or what they might be used for, 
but through the re-definition, acceleration or discarding of habituated 
processes of body, mind and values compelled by their new forms alone. 
The portraits of contemporary Canadian artists like Luc Courchesne, Max 
Dean, Geneviève Cadieux, John Oswald, Istvan Kantor, Mike Robinson, Lisa 
Steele and Kim Tomczak, Joanne Tod, Nicola Feldman-Kiss and Arnaud Maggs 
similarly destabilize meaning in this presumably most stable and ancient 
of art forms. These artists open a field where both the newest 
computer-dependent and video technologies and the most canonical or 
obsolete media are let loose to re-frame and re-construct new 
disciplines of body/mind imaging within the viewer and society. Their 
media re-calibrate what their portraits are, and how they rope you in, 
how close they get to you, become you, alter your own body/mind image 
and your perceptions of others, before you realize they are not there at 
all. Can these perturbing reflections also instigate reciprocal changes 
in the media themselves?


-- 
Wendy Duff
Associate Professor
140 St. George St
Toronto, Ontario
M5S 3G6
Phone 416-978-3152
Fax  416-971-1399


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