Kunstlicht, Journal for Art History, Visual Culture and Architecture
Vol. 36 (2015) no. 2. 'Unmasking the Persona: In Theory and Practice'

Deadline proposals: 14 April 2015
Issue release: Fall 2015

While notions of the artist as a solitary genius have been out of date
since the passing of Romanticism, the title continues to connote
ingenuity, eccentricity, and otherworldly inspiration. The image of the
artist as an individual of exceptional vision and allure endures,
provoking interest in the artist ‘behind' the work. Recognizing the
agency of this appeal, both within the clear frame of artistic
production and in so-called public life, artists have employed their
‘selves' as raw material – as an instrument or a medium – to present,
stage, modify, amplify, fictionalize, or critique. When consistent over
time, such self-presentations imply the creation of a persona: a fusion
of natural identity and artificiality, role-playing and theatrical
enactment.

Persona is certainly not exclusive to visual arts: stage performers and
celebrities often exhibit highly developed personas, and literary
personas offer another perspective altogether. Carl Jung has defined
persona as any "individual's system of adaptation to, or the manner he
assumes in dealing with, the world." Persona is art historically
relevant because it enables the investigation of public appearances as
performative and personas within and outside the aesthetic frame as
surrogate works of art. Often a continuity exists between the artist's
persona and the oeuvre, which makes the artist's self-presentation all
the more compelling and relevant.

When Andy Warhol famously stated, "I want to be a machine" in a 1963
interview, he merged the normally disparate realms of non-fictional,
everyday life with the work of art. Warhol used his presence as an
artwork and his identity as a form of branding, connecting his very self
to the notion of depersonalization – an important theme in his work. The
artist became the performance. This tendency can be observed throughout
the course of a persona-based history of art in which personality and
appearance form an artistic medium, as employed consciously or
unconsciously by pioneers like Warhol, Salvador Dalí, Yves Klein, Joseph
Beuys, and Valie Export, and further developed by artists as diverse as
Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, Andrea Fraser, Marina Abramovi?, Christoph
Schlingensief, and Banksy.

Furthermore, a persona may fulfill aims that are not merely artistic,
but also promotional. This function of persona could be said to go back
even as far as Vasari, who in his own writings about artists blurred
fact with fiction, ultimately raising the profile of his workshop.
Persona can also be projected upon artists by outside forces as a means
to sell art or promote a particular agenda, be it nationalistic (as in
the case of artists touted as national icons, such as Rembrandt or Van
Gogh), or otherwise. Persona in such a sense is driven by contextually
specific socio-economic forces, and reveals much about how perceptions
of the artist function as a fundamental element of history.

With this issue Kunstlicht investigates the hidden tradition of personas
in art history. The editorial board welcomes theoretical essays as well
as (comparative) case studies. Authors may propose topics as diverse as
(re)definitions of ‘persona', (re)contextualizations of existing
biographies, parallels with other art forms and non-artistic cases, or
discourse analyses.

Proposals (200 – 300 words) with attached résumés can be submitted until
April 14, 2014. Selected authors will be invited to write a 2,000 –
3,000-word paper (excluding notes). Papers may be written either in
English or in Dutch, although we insist that native Dutch speakers write
in Dutch. Authors who publish in Kunstlicht will receive three
complementary copies. Kunstlicht does not provide an author's
honorarium. Two years following publication, papers will be submitted to
the freely accessible online archive. This issue will appear in print,
and additionally will feature a number of articles published online.


Contact:
Kunstlicht
Vrije Universiteit
VU University Amsterdam
Faculteit der Letteren
Faculty of Arts
De Boelelaan 1105
1081 HV Amsterdam

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