Art as Projectives, and a Lifeline

Aida Hurttia

Jun 3

In celebration of my individual oral, this piece explores the themes of identity, beliefs and values in art, and the conflict between our resistance and acceptance of mortality.

Taoist philosopher Lao Tzu once said, "Life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides." Everyday we live our lives confronted with the uncertainty of death—our own death and the death of those around us. The truth of us as mortal beings shapes who we are and what we do, so long as there remains a conflict between our resistance and our acceptance of mortality. Upon resisting our existential fear, we categorize death as something which befalls those we do not know. Because death is something we do not understand. Through contrasting lenses, content and form, the short story The Oval Portrait by Edgar Allan Poe published in 1842, and the photograph Untitled by Anastasia Pottinger explore the themes of mortality and this ephemeral life through mediums of preservation, and through the employment of a false protagonist.

(Extract from The Oval Portrait, Edgar Allan Poe)

Unity of effect is a compositional philosophy which Poe achieves in his stories through the construction of the Gothic setting, word choice, symbolism, and economy of language, to all unanimously portray a mood of ambiguity and enigma. The Murders in the Rue Morgue and Other Tales explores death from a variety of perspectives through stories which are thematically driven rather than character driven. For instance, The Masque of the Red Death is a story written in the third-person perspective to communicate a collective message through Prince Prospero's resistance to the inevitability of his own mortality. Similar to The Oval Portrait, The Masque of the Red Death utilizes a false protagonist to maintain interpretive ambiguity throughout. In the stage of rising action in the short story The Cask of Amontillado, Montresor presented Fortunato with a trowel, a tool which would be later used by Montresor to murder Fortunado. An interpretation of this stylistic choice is that everyone is a mere choice away from, intentionally or not, killing themselves or others. And, even in the face of death, we remain oblivious to the possibility.

In The Oval Portrait, the painter spends his life immortalizing his lover while she spends her life bearing witness to the immortalization of herself in resistance of their innate fear of death. Upon resisting their inevitable fate, they fail to engage in that which gives mortality its weight in the first place, that is, to live. Poe suggests that life is no different from the redundancy of art — a painting is a thing of sight that holds no value unless seen as valuable by the observer. Thus, the death of the artist signifies the death of the art's original meaning, at which point the art serves as a personification of death.

Poe creates and uses layers of perception as a plot device to filtrate and influence the reader's experience of the portrait painting, and to create a forward momentum and suspense, a characteristic of the gothic genre. Poe creates the first layer of perception through writing in the first-person perspective, seen through the use of first-person pronouns such as "I" and "me" throughout the passage. The reader thus experiences a limited perception of the portrait painting within the story as dictated and filtrated by the experience of the single viewpoint. The first-person narrator uses pedantic diction such that the words spoken by the narrator are meant to be understood by the reader through their immediate denotation. However, this is contrasted by the use of abstract diction such as "admirable" from line 1, "beauty" from line 3, and "life-likeliness" from line 12, which are intangible and subjective concepts, so therefore varies from reader to reader in the concrete image it conjures. Even when the narrator has realized what it is that so moved them, namely "an absolute life-likeliness of expression", they do not reveal the specifics of that expression, only that it, and therefore the convoluted nature of death, "confounded, subdued, and appalled" them. The ambiguity allows for the story to appeal to no particular group of reader—the individual subjectivity of readers call for the possibility of subjective interpretation. By pertaining to his philosophy of composition, Poe achieves an atmosphere and mood of ambiguity. In the process, he exposes humanity's most central fear, that is, our fleeting existentiality, whereby the narrator realizes his individual insignificance. Because he is, as so are we all, slowly dying yet continuously living.

Poe creates the second layer of perception by employing an ambiguous central figure, that is the uncharacterized narrator. This, along with the first-person narration, creates little distance between the narrator and the reader, as the reader personalizes the ambiguous character to themselves. Upon discovering the underlying theme of The Oval Portrait, the ambiguous character, and thus the reader, experiences an inner conflict between their resistance and acceptance of mortality. This is demonstrated in the quote "satisfied with the true secret of its effect" from line 11, but upon further contemplation, the narrator's satisfaction diminished, as seen through the verb "appalled" from line 13. Poe creates the third layer of perception by detailing that the ambiguous character merely stumbled upon the artwork. This distances the artwork from the narrator, and creates an even greater distance between the artwork and the reader. The unfamiliarity of the subject to the narrator is demonstrated in the quote "had mistaken the head for that of a living person" from line 5. The fourth layer of perception lies in the fact that the same ambiguous central figure, or the narrator, is a false protagonist. Poe uses a false protagonist as a literary technique as their temporary characterization only leads to the devaluation of all characters. The ambiguity which interlaces The Oval Portrait concerning the now insignificance of the characters places emphasis on the overarching theme that is death which permeates human existence. In other words, mortality is The Oval Portrait's lingering protagonist.

(100: What Time Creates, Anastasia Pottinger)

The photography book Centenarians by Anastasia Pottinger contains photographs of a female centenarian and is a distillation of the human condition of old age—a stage of life so foreign and so distant from most. Once an experiment, the collection is now intended as a statement to remind us of the simple truth that death cannot be evaded. Because the photographs are so provokingly incomplete they demand our interaction in remembrance of what we have been, what we are, and as a reminder of what we will inevitably become. The collection of the Untitled photographs provokes a sense of resistance and denial to aging in some, while fostering acceptance in others, all depending on the viewers' perception of the act of aging.

Photography is the vehicle of eternity and memory, and here, Pottinger uses the medium as a lifeline. Here, the subject confronts her own mortality. Through the use of the medium of photography which grants visibility and promises immortality to all, Pottinger explores the frailty of the human body as an indicator of approaching mortality, and initiates a conversation with a society tirelessly infatuated with youthful vigor.

(100: What Time Creates, Anastasia Pottinger)

The photograph Untitled by Anastasia Pottinger is a dialogue between past, present, and future and is intended as a bridge between viewer and subject. The meaning of photography was once in its ability to immortalize a subject at a given point in time, but has since shifted to its function as a shared memory. Because things, it seems, are only real when shared—especially in the time and context in which this photograph was taken in the year 2018. Pottinger's contextual intentions are paramount in shaping her approach to photographing the centenarian's drooping breasts—a state of the female body achievable only through time.

The three-dimensional masses of the female breasts are distinguishable by Pottinger's manipulation of light and shadow, creating a center of interest in the audience's perception. The intricacies of the lines which constitute skin texture, are visible from a close-up shot depicting the alternation between the dark and light tonal values. The conveyed sense of texture is the visual equivalent of the sense of touch, eliciting an emotional response so obscure the audience is left to ponder. Pottinger portrays unity in the progression of form created through dimension and camera angle, but the unity, however, is juxtaposed by the contrast of the photograph's tonal scale. This tension imparts a social comment regarding the divide between people who believe that growing old and dying is what gives life its meaning, and people who view death as something which rids life of meaning. This parallels Pottinger's critique of society's obsession with youth as she photographs its antithesis and provides the audience an opportunity to appreciate and accept real bodies as they age.

Pottinger's intention is to persuade the audience who resist the notion of mortality to instead celebrate its inevitability. Its sentimentality guides the audience to readjust their perception of the photograph to be viewed through the lens of acceptance so that death is not understood to be the end of life, but is rather a part of life itself. Because nothing stands out emphatically, Pottinger leaves room for the audience's processes of perception to commence at their own time and pace. Throughout her other Untitled pieces from the Centenarians collection, Pottinger reduces the intimacy of the nude photographs through the depersonalization of the subject, and thus revealing the subject to be, from an artistic standpoint, a false protagonist. The ambiguous nature of the photographs acts as a catalytic force for its intended purpose as projectives; Pottinger redirects attention away from the subject to communicate a collective message rather than to give a personal account. However, the willingness of the subject to be photographed requires vulnerability, and thus acceptance of her bodily state to be documented and shared. Such assent to her reality and her position on the passage of time denotes her complete surrender to not knowing when or how she will die, only that it is soon.

In summary, the intended audience of the short story The Oval Portrait by Edgar Allan Poe and the photograph Untitled by Anastasia Pottinger are different as the states of societies change upon the progression of time. However, through different content and form, the two works explore the notion of existential dread which remains unchanged even through the change in time and audience. Although The Oval Portrait outlines a painting, a medium typically perceived through the lens of subjectivity, Poe provides the reader with an interpretation already made by the dominant narrative voice and thus provides a nuanced insight to man's reaction when faced with the reminder of one's own temporality. On the contrary, in alignment with Pottinger's intention, the medium of photography allows us to see the subject as they are. Thus, the viewer directly interacts with the text, where their perception is dependent on their own perspective on the notion of mortality. In either case, both Poe's and Pottinger's intended message is that the uncertainty of death is shadowed by its certainty, and one need not live in dread.

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