Lilla LoCurto and William Outcault: Self-Portraits for a New Millennium

Abstract

The venerable self-portrait tradition, in which artists typically explore and reveal intimate facets of their physical and psychological being, is both respected and exploded in the work of Lilla LoCurto and William Outcault. In their first collaborative work, an interactive video installation titled Self-Portrait and produced in 1992, the husband-and-wife team introduced a theme that has continued to fascinate them to this day—the endurance and ultimate vulnerability of the human body. Conceived during the height of the AIDS epidemic and prompted by their desire to understand the nature of this threat, Self-Portrait, consisting of a stacked sequence of video images and depicting the fragmented figures of the artists and others encased in a plastic bubble, represented the assault on the integrity of the individual and public body during times of crisis. The powerful installation marked a turning point in the career of these former sculptors who, since the mid-1990s, have experimented with increasingly complex digital technology, focusing on their self-image to create innovative works that radically reconfigure this age-old genre.