What is a portrait?
A likeness, is the obvious answer, but by likeness, do we mean the faithful representation of the simplest camera shot, or a re-presentation of this particular human being at this particular time?
Picasso was excited by the invention of the camera, because he thought it would free portraiture from the burden of representation. Ordinary painters feared they would be put out of business. Better artists, as ever, would use the new technology directly, as a new means of expression, and indirectly, as a chance to experiment.
For Picasso, the portrait became a kind of psychological theatre; a collusion of the sitter and the artist, to create a way of seeing that was not dependent on surface reality; other realities were forced through in fragments and colours, the way that dreams force their way through to unsettle our day time stability.
The portrait goes on evolving, side by side with its most traditional manifestations. This doesn't matter, there is no right or wrong, there is only art or not art, however you make it. What does matter though, is a commitment to experiment; we understand that science has to experiment to move forward. We don't always understand that the same is true for art.

Marilene Oliver has taken technology - in this case the MRI scan - and used it to re-invent the portrait. If art is about manipulating the surface to get underneath the surface, what better way than by scanning the inside of a body, and using the ghostly results to figure the subject inside out?
The inside of the body is a fearful place, usually left to the medical profession or the horror industry. Damien Hirst's medieval goriness is well known enough to be comfortable now, but slicing up cadavers - the meat-art of the slaughterhouse, shocked us in the 1980's because the inside is the place we don't look. Freud and Jung made the inside of our heads fashionable. The inside of our bodies is still taboo.
The great surprise of Marilene Oliver's work on the inside out, is that it is beautiful.
Beauty is still a suspect word in art, but it is time to reclaim it, and to do so without compromise or sentimentality.
We're not talking about prettiness, but about something grand, imposing, compelling and fierce. When we look at Family Portrait, the bodies are vulnerable and frail (can we really be made up of so little?) - but they also allow us to contemplate the proportions, the architecture, the skill and scale of the human being.
While our society worships looks and style, and makes its judgements accordingly, the judgement of the body is very different. The cells, systems, tissues and cavities of the body are perfectly made. Marilene Olivier has re-constructed us, so that we can view ourselves differently. This is both poignant and liberating. We are more and less than we thought. We are movingly similar - her family is our family, is each one of us. In the context of the exposed, inside-out body, our separate personalities are temporarily erased, freeing us from the worry of self, into a united place that all of us share.
It is this united place that art makes possible.
But look closely, and the differences are there, even in the bodies we share. Self is cellular.

In the twentieth century art broke all traditional boundaries. Mixed media and combinatory forms have challenged the clean lines of sculpture, painting, print making etc. Marilene Oliver's work is a robust and bold amalgamation of separate skills and styles, with an utterly contemporary feel for the cross-over of art and technology. Moving from the esoteric possibilities of the MRI scan, she has taken the ordinary mobile phone and turned its text messages into a series of direct hits on the body. Words become arrows. Language is piercing. We are shot through with signals.
Again, the piece is beautiful - a scale version of her own body, made porcupine with copper darts. Like Antony Gormely, she uses herself, because her self is what she knows, but always the self is transformed into a place of imagination and contemplation. The landscape of the body becomes the body of the world.
In the world, there is no place left where a text message can't reach us. Indeed, other people's text messages are continually passing through our bodies, as we act as innocent antennae for the vast vibrating communication of modern life.
Communication. Communion. St Sebastian is here, and the crucified Christ. Common humanity is what we share, and we suffer for it - our progress leaves us little private space. We can always be found - and our bodies bear the secret marks of so much intrusion.
That we have no private space is amply demonstrated by these personal messages available for all of to read. Text messages, the most impermanent of communications, are held here like tags from scripture. They are indeed 'texts' - primed with meaning, layers of life, mine, yours, written on the body.
But this is a joyful, playful piece of work too. The body is not pinned down. The body bristles with life. Text Me is an eloquent joke, a humorous response to the thickets of signals we negotiate every day. And the obverse of the piercing is defence. This body has its own force-field. The texts are protection as well as intrusion.
And some of them are very funny…

The utter sadness of Ophelia uses a different kind of message - the email, for a woman who has drowned in words. As she lies in her lit -up sarcophagus, the light flowing round her like water, she is an icon of despair. The modern world brings its own special pain - pain of distance and separation and loss, but mediated through the brutal impersonality of computers. What can seem so close and familiar - communication across the world, is also the easiest way of hurting someone without hurting yourself.
Hamlet's Ophelia dies of a misunderstanding. Misunderstanding is the strange paradox of the computer age - information is everywhere, but the meaning is lost inside the data.
Oliver's Ophelia is like visiting a saint's shrine. It is in the tradition of reliquaries, yet utterly modern. Like all her work, it has a narrative, but the narrative never gets in the way of simple contemplation. All of these pieces are for looking at, for long musings, for new insights, for visual awakenings.
I love her work because it does what art is supposed to do; open the way to another world.

Jeanette Winterson 2003

Biography

1977 Born in UK

1996 - 1999 Central Saint Martin’s College of Art & Design, B A (Hons) in Fine Art, Printmaking and Photomedia

1999 – 2001 Royal College of Art, London, M A (RCA) in Fine Art Printmaking

2003 - 2005 Fine Art Digital Co-ordinator, Royal College of Art, London

2003 Visiting Lecturer, Central Saint Martin’s College of Art & Design, London

2004 Visiting Lecturer, Brighton University

2005 Visiting Lecturer, The Ruskin School of Fine Art, Oxford University

2005 Visiting Lecturer, Royal Academy, London

Solo Exhibitions

2003 Intimate Distances Beaux Arts, London

2004 Intimate Distances SPHN Galerie, Berlin, Germany

2004 Intimate Distances Djanogly Art Gallery, Nottingham

Group Exhibitions

1998 22 Printmakers, Standpoint Gallery, London

1999 Screensavers, Lauderdale House, Archway, London

1999 Now Vision, Victoria and Albert museum, London

2000 Divine Expiration, Takumi Studio, Gifu City, Japan

2001 Never Look Here, Foyles Gallery, London.

2002 ART2002, Beaux Arts, London

2002 Beaux Arts, London

2004 Print Open, Invited artist, RWA, Bristol

2004 Summer Exhibition, The Royal Society, London

2004 Gods Becoming Men, Frissarius Museum, Athens, Greece

2004 Beaux Arts, London

2004 The Magic Inside, The Science Museum, London

2004 Technique, Royal College of Art

2005 Art 2005, Islington Design Centre

2005 Royal Academy Summer Show, London

2005 Young Masters, Art Fortnight, London

2005 Summer 2005, Beaux Arts, London

Forthcoming Exhibitions

2005MiniArttextil 2005, Como, Italy

2005 Beaux Arts, London

2005 Art AID, London,

2005 Acts, Kulturhof Flachsgasse,

2006 Medicine and Contemporary Art, Kunst Museum Ahlen, Germany

2006 Medicine and Contemporary Art, Kunstspeicher Würzburg, Germany

2006 When Two Worlds Collide, Beaux Arts, London, Solo Show

Public Collections

2004 The Djanogly Art Gallery, Nottingham

2004 The Wellcome Trust, London

2005 The Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Bibliography

2001 The Times, page 5, 30 th May 2001

Friday Review, The Independent, 1 st June 2001

Bizarre Magazine, August 2001

Printmaking Today, page 5, Autumn 2001

2002 Art Review, December / January 2002

Art Tomorrow , Edward Lucie-Smith, Vilo International, October 2002

2003 Jeanette Winterson, Catalogue Essay, Beaux Arts

The Art Newspaper , no.139, September 2003

Wallpaper , page 245, October 2003

Printmaking Today , page 21, Autumn 2003

2004 Kunstforum International, page 230, February 2004

Die Welt , 13 th February 2004

Printmaking Today , page 10/11, Summer 2004

Metro , Metro Life, page 17, 27 th July 2004.

Evening Post, page 21 2 nd September, page 3, July 30 2004

The Independent, The Information page 13, 24 th July 2004

The Guardian, The Guide, 21 st August 2004

Leonardo Magazine , Issue 37:5, Artist Statement. Autumn 2004

2005 Daily Telegraph, page 19, 1 st June 2005

Evening Standard , page 18, 20 th June 2005

2006 Prints Now by Gill Saunders & Rosie Miles, V&A Publication, Spring 2006

Residences, Prizes & Commissions

1999 Now Vision, Cannon Photography Prize

2000 Artist in Residence, Takumi Studio, Gifu, Japan

2001 Alf Dunn Prize

2001 Printmaking Today Prize

2004 Sound response by Max Richter to Intimate Distances