July 16, 2009
Portrait of an Image a portfolio by Roni Horn
The cult status Isabelle Huppert has attained clearly reflects a contemporary sensitivity to the closure she conveys--the impassivity of her cheeks and mouth, the unseeing eyes--her craft residing almost exclusively in the periorbital, auricular, and frontalis musculature of her face. The epitome of subtle self-differing, for Roni Horn, she was ideal. But if the premise of Portrait of an Image was to capture an assortment of major characters Huppert has portrayed on screen the parenthetical credit the actress receives suggests that Roni Horn views her participation as something of a cameo performance, a "cameo" perhaps in the sense that she lends only the gemlike relief through which the otherwise invisible and therefore external personae enter into the picture. To do so, however, Isabelle Huppert had in fact been constrained, not to assume a variety of aspects but rather to revisit and reassume temporally distant ones constitutive of roles played in the past, locating the concomitant sets of physical reflexes in her muscular memory as might an athlete or a musician. During two weeks of sittings involving one character chosen by mutual agreement each day, Roni Horn apparently offered little direction other than to coax the film actress's practiced averted glance into the lens of a still camera destined to fix her in a way quite different from that of the motion picture. This exercise left Roni Horn with the ineradicable impression that Isabelle Huppert had engaged in an act of "self-impersonation," a rich term in that it conveys the imitation and imposture, the self-alienation or no-ownership approach to personal properties, which lie at the very basis of personation, while at the same time it reminds us that for each of the personae, no original exists.
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Portrait of an Image: a portfolio by Roni Horn
