Subject Matter: Models for Different Media

Abstract

carving, much older than oil painting, that includes theater and religious ritual, pornography and statesmanship: the art of self-presentation. The medium of one's own person can be used like any other to persuade, manipulate, or express a truth. In everyday life we all dress and comport ourselves in accordance with public expectations and private taste; to achieve particular ends may require special efforts to the right impression. But models, like actors, public speakers, and prostitutes, have a special investment in their appearances and, even more, in their ability to present them: it is essential to their work, not merely to their success, to produce the spectacle of themselves. The most potent aspect of the presented self is visual. Modeling is singularly pure in this respect, for where actors and prostitutes and statesmen make use of their looks, the model's sole end is the image she makes of herself. Yet the status of that image is ambiguous: from it the artist makes an image of his own, which the model may perceive and interpret in her turn.2 The image she sees is not what she has made, but in some sense it is the result of what she has done. For her the making of a picture is a process-like a theatrical production, a political campaign, or a dinner party-with distinct participants and an end. But the model's perspective on making pictures has not had a place in the standard discourse on art, which has over the past two centuries developed the idea that the creative process, the activity of making, belongs exclusively to the artist's internality. Models have emerged only here and there for anecdotal purposes, usually appearing as characters in the lives of artists, occasionally featuring in discussions of academic practice. The work of art itself, once completed, has been critically regarded in many different lights: as a record of making, say, or a direct communication from the artist, or a manifestation of cultural or psycho-