#10: Pile a Portrait
Put stuff in a pile and take a picture.
Instructions
Pick a person to make a portrait of—yourself included.
Find some stuff that represents this person.
Pile it or stack it.
Document it and share it with a friend.
Image: me on the left; “me” on the right
Huh the Wha?
“What are … you … doing?” was the gentle question my wife spoke as I started putting onions, markers, and kale into a vase. “Making ... ugh ... stuff” I grunted in return. We’ve spent the last year barely leaving our one bedroom apartment, so things are weird. We’re extremely lucky to be where we are, to be relatively healthy, and to still like each other—and it’s also a little mind-melting.
This week I wanted to find a creative activity that didn’t involve drawing or any making that could get tripped up by self-judgment.
Enter the pile portrait, or found object portrait.
Putting objects together to represent a person isn’t a new idea. In some cases, it’s objects to create/recreate a literal portrait such as the work of Bernard Pras or Noah Scalin.
Other artists have used materials as diverse as floppy disks, rubik’s cubes, and even carved books. Sometimes an artist can use objects that have meaning to the person being depicted, such as the family portraits created by photographer Camilla Catrambone.
In the most abstract sense, an artist can infuse a single object with meaning, as in the case of the “candy spills” of artist Félix González-Torres.
Image: Félix González-Torres. Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.). Photographed at Art Institute of Chicago, 1991
In these deceptively simple works, a pile of wrapped candy is placed (often against a wall or corner) in a gallery, and visitors are encouraged to take one. Decontextualized, this sugar break in a gallery crawl is a small moment of delight—and/or confusion, depending on how often you visit art museums. However, the candy is usually placed at the same weight of the artist’s partner Ross Laycock, and the depletion of the size of the pile is what Art Institute curator James Rondeau called “an allegorical portrait” of Laycock losing weight and dying of an AIDS-related illness.
I’m struggling to finish this post with some convenient tying together of threads, but perhaps that's too much to ask for these days. The sense of being unmoored in a sea of grief and uncertainty is appropriate. Curators and writers have interpreted González-Torres as using candy—a traditional symbol of love and sweetness—to remind us that love remains even as the people we love physically leave us.
Look around you, and take in the sadness, but also leave room for the love that’s always present. And then do something creative—like finding stuff around you, putting it in a pile, photographing it, and sharing it with a friend. It helps.