This doctoral thesis uses Judith Butler’s phrase, ‘scenes of address’, to explore the ways in which artworks can stage the giving of an account of oneself within the formal innovations of portraiture from the United States of the 1960s and 1970s, encompassing aspects of narrative, informal conversation, and monologue. As the primary marker of social relations, these accounts often revolve around labour, both its presence and absence. Modulating a Marxist understanding of the rise of monopoly capitalism with a set of terms taken from Theodor Adorno and György Lukács, I argue that these artworks exist in spite of a structural tendency toward stasis, which throughout this thesis takes on different names, such as reification, identity thinking, stereotype, canon, and convention. This investigation aims to reassess the epistemological grounding for ‘realism’, moving away from a priority afforded to mimetic representations of the external world. I make an argument for ‘realist practices of portraiture’ which, rather than reproducing the misidentifications produced by a reified world, understand the reality pointed to by ‘realism’ as contingent, dynamic and accessible via particulars. Contrary to the argument that portraiture is a reflection of external identities validated by the artwork, these practices instead encompass non-identity, recognising the gap between concept and object. They note the particulars of experience that the subject attempts to account for alongside the necessary assimilation of those particulars into named generalities. Beginning with a historical and philosophical consideration of portraiture in this period, including works by Walter De Maria and Robert Rauschenberg, I then move into two central case studies. Firstly, I will examine Shirley Clarke’s 1967 film Portrait of Jason for the ways in which a struggle over the nature of ‘realism’ intersects with access to labour, read alongside films and paintings by Andy Warhol, Larry Rivers, and Alice Neel. Secondly, I will consider the ways in which photo-text installations and slide sequences by Allan Sekula use mediation to stage differing perspectives on the lack of labour, this time read in comparison with an example of painted portraiture by Robert Bechtle, and video works by Clarke. Finally, I summarise my argument as to the constitution of ‘realist practices of portraiture’.
