Self as Subject

Art in which artists use their own bodies, lives, routines and invented personas as material, beyond the painted likeness.

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About

Some artists go beyond recording their likeness and make their own life, body or persona the material. Around 1921 Marcel Duchamp posed for Man Ray as his female alter ego, Rrose Sélavy, and the French photographer Claude Cahun spent the 1920s and 1930s photographing herself shaven-headed, masked or costumed, unsettling any fixed identity. Yves Klein's photomontage Leap into the Void (1960) shows the artist launching himself from a wall above a quiet street.

From the 1960s the self became a site of endurance and record. Günter Brus painted himself white, divided by a black line, for Self-Painting, Self-Mutilation (1965) in Vienna. On Kawara mailed postcards stamped with the time he got up each day, and Tehching Hsieh punched a time clock every hour for a year in Time Clock Piece (1980–81), photographing himself each time. Luigi Ontani stages himself as saints, heroes and figures from myth.