THE NON-SELF PORTRAITURE OF ROBERT RAINEY
By Lizzie Zucker Saltz
Like artists
Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons, newcomer Robert Rainey made the leap
from the corporate world into that of contemporary art. His
crossover outlook has produced a remarkable and timely series of
conceptual photographic portrait projects. After working as a
graphic designer, art director, and entertainment marketer for
nearly 17 years÷five as Miramaxâs V.P. of Creative
Advertising during the companyâs ground-breaking formative years1÷a
life-threatening heart arrhythmia forced Rainey to return to the
South for a risky surgery, reconsider his priorities, ãget off
the wheel·and edit life tighter.ä2
Rainey chose to return to his first love, photography, taking
classes and eventually pursuing a M.F.A. at Virginia
Commonwealth University in Richmond, which, amusingly, he saw as
a relaxingly self-indulgent pursuit after the ãself-imposed
dramaä and ãconstant pressure of money.ä
The idea that I might have a life as an artist
was a revelation.· What I soon realized was that in spite of all
of my professional experience, I actually had something to say
which was a product of myself. Everything prior·had been a team
effort of sorts.3
In light of
this, it is telling that Rainey's ease with collaborative and
market-driven production resulted in work unusual for its
submerged self-expressivity and concern with audience reception.
His artworks' origins are nonetheless deeply personal,
especially the Family Self Portrait Series begun in 2004,
in which Rainey addresses, albeit obliquely, his homosexuality.
In so doing, he engages with a tradition of performative
photography linked to late-1980s identity politics. Yet Rainey's
work reads as a cool 21st century antidote to the
highly expressive, revealing, confessional, and sometimes
purposely shocking self-transformations
of gender-benders such as Loren Cameron, Deborah Kass, Robert
Mapplethorpe, Catherine Opie, Pierre et Gilles, and Lyle Ashton
Harris, to name a few. It also coolly answers the numerous queer
identity exhibitions that took place during the Stonewall 25
season.4
Not that
Rainey was a stranger to the sturm und drang of the late 1980s.
Born in 1963, he participated in the political theatrics of such
vital AIDS activist organizations as ACT UP and Queer Nation in
New York City at that ãconfusing time when all my New York
mentors were dying, a typesetter one day, a photo retoucher¼. I
recall one year when someone was dying all the time¼it was
unbearable.ä
This sets the
scene for his Family Self Portrait Series
which on the surface seem utterly banal. What
transforms them from mundane to complex is that in each image, I
have replaced a family member with myself. I literally become an
ãactorä in someone else's environment. The idea here is to
challenge conventional notions of what a family is and what
"family" means. By inserting myself in a foreign context, I am
subverting the conventional implications of ãidentityä for the
typical family· [I]n view of the Southâs notoriously
conservative attachment to social and moral norms, the pictures
suggest a variety of controversial meanings. In addition, I
would suggest that the most interesting aspect of these pictures
is the fact that I have not staged them or art-directed them in
any way: these are real families in their own homes.5
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Robert Rainey,
Self Portrait:
Same Sex Engagement, fall 2004, from the
Family Self Portrait Series, giclée print on
canvas, 17 x 31 inches
(courtesy of the artist) |
The process
canât be separated from the series' meaning. Rainey places
ads÷in effect casting calls÷on the well-known Craigslist.com
site, offering free professional family portraits in exchange
for contributing to a graduate student art project. He hones the
type of targeted families by adding one of these lines:
-Seeking family with newborn celebrating
baptismal or Christening;
-Seeking All American Family with the perfect white picket
fence;
-Seeking couple with lots of different animals as pets and
considers them family;
-Seeking family who collects art and would like to be
photographed in front of their art.6
He was
fortunate that several gay couples responded, as well as
numerous straight families. He weeded out nine out of ten,
selecting those who seemed the most open and least demanding on
the phone.
The telephone interview was very telling and I
would explain the concept at that point. I would meet with the
families/wives at a coffee shop and show them some of my work. I
would ask them to bring pics of their homes... and favorite
family shots they had of themselves.· At this point we would
move forward with the project or not.... Most of the situations
were put together quite naturally and I would always question
how could I push the situation to speak about current dialogue
of 2005... the dialogue within the press on the religious right,
gay marriage, etc.7
These
preliminary meetings allowed him to refine his selection even
further, and led to collaborations with one out of three
families. He then visited their homes, to return in appropriate
costume and sit in as one of its members.
An army of
Hollywood set decorators could not find more revealing locations
to serve as commentary on the variety of contemporary American
families or the visual codes through which we infer class and
value systems. From the handgun Rainey didnât realize he was
practically sitting on in Self Portrait: Same Sex Engagement to
the all-black outfits of the art collecting family in Self
Portrait: Power Family, each interior constitutes Found Art:
Reality TV as conceptual art.
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|
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Caption:
Robert Rainey,
Self Portrait:
Power Family, spring 2004, from the
Family Self
Portrait Series, giclée print on canvas, 17 x
31 inches
(courtesy of the artist) |
The project's
political subtext is proffered as a puzzle. Which family member
is Rainey replacing? Who is the ãrealä Rainey? Notably, Rainey
offers no information about his sexual orientation. His bland,
Babbitt-like, middle-aged ãwhite-maleä visage, coupled with an
ability to blend, chameleon-like, into a variety of environs,
underscores a firm belief in identity as fluid, arbitrary, and
contextual. While his collaborator in Self Portrait: Same Sex
Engagement was, in fact, a member of a gay couple seeking an
engagement portrait with their beloved pets, in Self Portrait:
Same Sex Marriage Family Rainey replaces the wife, but chooses
to don male attire, imposing a same-sex story where there was
none. The series is made to order for this moment, when gay
marriage is in the political spotlight and when, Rainey feels,
it is vital not to ãhit people over the head.ä He adds:
[I] prefer to
engage people in questioning about the family, let them have a
discovery process¼in order to reach a larger audience.¼ If I can
make them question their role¼, then it's not just about the
narrow issue of myself, of my gay identity.ä
Rainey's
Family Self Portrait Series mimes the family portrait genre
without mocking it. His portraits retain the humanity and
dignity of their subjects because he integrates each family. The
artist-as-method-actor embraces each found identity sincerely,
ãunderstanding the drama of the moment.ä
Three parallel
projects-in-process elucidate the emerging artistâs modus
operandi. In the Family Reenactment series, diptychs combine
ãphotos of my family prior to my birth¼[which] I reassemble¼in
exactly the same setting and re-photograph¼. [In Uncles], the
passage of time is blatantly obvious in the stooped postures of
my dad and his brothers, now in their 80s.ã8
Again, the artistâs own interests are revealed yet
hidden, with larger issues illuminated in the process; in this
case, the nature of mortality and the ambivalent urge to define
ourselves in relation to the life trajectories of our kin.
In the
Walmartification Series, Rainey is again his own producer,
actor, director, and location scout, disappearing behind the
identities of Wal-Mart photo customers. He takes a number and
observes random persons ahead of him as they create their own
commercial self-portraits. Then, as the next customer in line,
he copies their pose and props, requiring the willing
collaboration of a Wal-Mart photo-shop employee.9
The results are hilarious and disturbing, especially in images
where he adopts the demeanor of children.
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Robert Rainey,
Walmartification: Boy with Bear, spring 2005,
from the
Walmartification Series,
color print, 11 x 17 inches (courtesy of the artist) |
Finally, in
researching his southern relations who fought on the confederate
side, he has begun to infiltrate the strange world of Civil War
reenactors. No small task, as they are understandably a guarded
group, with more political stripes than one might assume of
people obsessed with ãthe war of northern aggression,ä as it is
still referred to in the South. Rainey's ability to capture
anachronisms and to detect and relay the loaded subtexts of
reenactments, reenactors, and their surroundings in the
Reenactment Series÷without meddling or staging÷is further
testimony to his ability to earn the trust of ãRed Stateä
denizens. From Woman of War, his portrait of two cheeky
gals accurately reenacting soldiers who enrolled in drag,10
to Kids of War, a pair of leery teens shrouded by fog, the
images convey the specters of failure that still haunt
economically struggling southern cities, such as his hometown of
St. Petersburg.
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Caption: Robert Rainey, Artillery
Unit, summer 2004, from the
Reenactment
Series, Epson ultrachrome inks on Hahneühle
paper, 32 x 40 inches
(courtesy of the artist) |
Rainey's
collaborations with different groups and individuals on projects
that reflect contemporary American experience produce work that
is distinctly sensitive to audience accessibility. Despite a
film-still style and penchant for fiction, Rainey's real-world
methodology distances him from the overtly theatrical and
referential photographers he superficially resembles, such as
Cindy Sherman or Yasumasa Morimura, and, surprisingly, weds him
to that goddess of conceptual community-collaboration, Mierle
Ukeles.
Notes
1. For more on Miramaxâs
central role in redefining film in the 21st
century, see Peter Biskind, Down and Dirty Pictures:
Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film, New
York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.
Robert Rainey
currently resides in Albuquerque, where he is pursuing a M.F.A.
at the University of New Mexico. He spent over a decade in the
entertainment industry where he directed hundreds of marketing
campaigns for movies such as Basquiat, Pulp Fiction, The
English Patient, and Good Will Hunting. His photographs were
last seen in January 2005 at Chicagoâs Heaven Gallery in Who
Makes Self Portraits in 2004?, a group exhibition curated by
Jason Lazarus. His upcoming projects include a solo show at the
Chicago Cultural Center [July 14÷August 31, 2006]. Raineyâs
current work can be found at
www.robertrainey.com.
Lizzie Zucker
Saltz
is a freelance writer who has been contributing to ART PAPERS
since 1998. Her essay on the work of Laleh Mehran appeared in
ART PAPERS 29:2 (March-April 2005). She is also the founder and
director of ATHICA: Athens Institute for Contemporary Art in
Athens, GA. The author thanks Edwyna Arey, co-curator of
Relative: Photographing Domesticity, a group exhibition
presented at ATHICA in fall 2004, for bringing Mr. Raineyâs work
to her attention.
