Replications (Dark-Haired Girls) is a group of five double portraits, each painting”repeating” a woman twice. The paintings form a unit by the symbolic pairing of the outside panels and by the continuous pattern in the backgrounds. In each case one portrait was done from a photograph and the second image copied from the first. The figures were repeated as perfectly as the artist’s hand would allow, so perfectly that the viewer is faced with a portrait which has reproduced itself. In the most obvious way, the one-to-one relation between the painted image and someone out there in the world has started to waver.

It wavers because the same skill that forces us to be aware of someone, forces us to acknowledge at the same time, not a person, but a template of ap-pearances, a representational scheme. The viewer is strung like a wire between these two poles, unable to relax into either possibility.

There is a machine at the centre of this work, an artist like the State. Her skill is not a humanist ability; it functions technocratically, treating both the sitter and the resulting painting as objects. They are qualities processed and homogenized abstractly, displaced for brute functioning. The paintings therefore are anti-portraits where the subject is not revealed through their appearance.

The exact repetition of the image destroys any sense we could have of the person’s physical appearance being unique or transitory – and therefore expressive of the sitter as an individual. And similarly, there is no sense here of the artist struggling to “capture”something. Her ability to do it twice states the dominance of her skill over her subject. There is no give-and-take between the artist and the sitter, only the rule of an exact skill, almost a technology. The face becomes a kind of resistance.

The bureaucratization of the artist is expressed primarily by the internalization of photography. At a conceptual level, and as the subtitle “Dark-Haired Girls” indicates, the portraits share with the Bechers’ photographic works a concern with typology. But where, for the Bechers, appearance is linked to func-tion, Tod’s girls are irreducible, a kind of social raw material. In general it is studio photography that has been assimilated: as a laconic factuality, a sensual distance, a regard, a standardization of treatment, poses, and backdrops — and especially the technical ability to reproduce any element ad infinitum.

The backgrounds are curious, a pattern of polite hands clapping: a co-opted response to the artist’s skill perhaps, or for these women delivered to our gaze, women against a wall of applause? But the hands, I learned, stand for “painting” in sign-language.Recoding ordinary language in visibility, the appearance of sign-language in the portraits suggests that painting is dependent on language, that meaning can only be something “sayable”. Meaning has been appropriated by language.Since the link between appearance and expression is broken, and as every visible thing becomes a resistance, the structures by which painting can convey meaning increasingly appear to dissolve.

Language asserts itself as the only means by which painting can be rescued from its autism. But this attempt to bring meaning (as language) into the painting, in a form which is visually strong, cannot suc-ceed, simply because the only language which is ex-tensive, supple, and shared by all her audience, is ordinary language. We can only learn about the pattern through spoken words or a written text; it necessitates some prior speech that would wrap the paintings. The contradiction between the demands of painting and meaning considered as language are obvious in the sign’s existence within a pattern. The sign grows in decorative strength as it nears Pattern-Painting, but the signal erodes toward a monotone. Painting is not a kind of sign-language, a mid-point between language and the visible. It is its own

language. And although Tod’s portraits suggest that she believes painting to be in a position of dependency, they could never be as productive or forceful as they are unless they could speak without deference to language. Their basis is in representa-tion. But what is valuable in them is not really the representation of a face, however skilful, but the representation of a specifically modern situation where the supersession of meaning by function intersects with the appropriation of meaning by language. It means in art what it means on the street: that each of us is confronted directly by the bureaucratic functioning of the state, constantly, and without the mediation of traditional structures. Meaning is experienced as always lying “outside”: outside painting, as language. Outside our lives, outside our society.

The value of this group of paintings is simply that of an artist taking up a certain situation which is dominant in our lives and presenting it without distortion. But even though everything fits – even the smallest brush-mark or the way the figure is stuck over the background without transition – I wonder if the whole conceptual scheme of the piece isn’t simply a rationalization to allow the artist to continue to work as she was going to anyway. This is backwards. Somehow the conceptual structure of the work and its execution must permeate and change each other. In this case the gulf between the execution of the conceptual scheme works to the paintings’ advantage.

ANDY PATTON

Parachute, Winter 1981