Page 92 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Virginia Oldoini + Pierre-Louis Pierson: Countess Castiglione (Self-) Portraits c1860s.
Oldoini has no time or desire to learn the mechanics of photography herself. Not for her the blackened fingers, the volatility and bad-egg odours of the dark-room, nor even the business of adjusting the lens. Her idea of photography is to get an expert to do it for her. So in the mid 1850s she strikes a remarkable arrangement with the portrait professional Pierre-Louis Pierson, and through him, Virginia Oldoini becomes perhaps the first female photographic art director/artist. She re-enacts moments from her fabulous life as a stylish and seductive courtesan (she enjoyed various liaisons with courtiers, financiers and other wealthy men, all the time cultivating her seductive, femme fatale image). Her series of collaborations with Pierson make her a very important precursor of 20th century artists who are absorbed with their own image, such as Cindy Sherman, Gilbert and George, and Claude Cahun in the 1920s. There is a certain, slightly deranged Miss Havisham quality about her...
There is a subtle distinction between the self revelation of the repeatedly painted self portrait (as practised famously by Rembrandt, and Vincent van Gogh), and the consuming, perhaps narcissistic, fascination with the mirror-images and continual versioning of the self that we re-package for public consumption. Lacan suggests that this self-absorption follows the mirror stage (stade du miroir) and results in the turning of the self into an object that can be viewed ‘objectively’ by the artist. Of course, the artist’s environment and tools change from the 19th century - artists have access to a new mirroring tool - the camera - and Virginia Oldoini adopts the camera - through Pierson, her technical assistant, to become the tool and the medium by which she promotes the semi-autobiographical and semi-fantastic images of her persona. In this, she becomes a precedent for a strand of portraiture whereby artists use their own modulated images often as conceptual portraits - examples of this in the 20th century include the a-gender surrealist Claude Cahun, the conceptual portraitist Cindy Sherman, and much of the work of Gilbert and George. The revelation of having a tool and a medium by which to publish and propagate art is of course a feature of the present - the WWW and social media provide a multiplicity of means to examine oneself, one’s public image, and aspects of self-revelation.