An-My Lê: On Contested Terrain

By Louis Block

In her picture of a lieutenant commander sitting below deck on the USS Ronald Reagan, An-My Lê steps back to reveal the naval portrait studio’s illusion: a printed backdrop with its crank for quick adjustment, clamps holding flags in precise position, and a lighting rig peeking out from behind the chair. With his arms carefully placed on the prop desk, this subject’s gaze seems interior, as if meditating on the future product: a distinguished portrait displaying his accomplishments and rank, indicated by the crisp insignia on his uniform. Another sailor leans in to adjust the subject’s tie, the lack of blur indicating a sustained pose. The further our own gaze strays from the picture’s center, the more details we discover to distract from the subject: a ribbon of tape falling off the backdrop’s edge, a curious black mass encroaching into the composition, and a white bowl, its sterile ellipse bending into the distortion at the frame’s edge. Pulling back to the picture’s center, a number of formal relationships become apparent: the line of the lieutenant commander’s right shoulder continued in the band of the sailor’s wristwatch, the analogous shapes of his collar and the flags behind him, and the play between his white cap and the empty bowl to his left. Inflection points in the composition, such as the touch between shoulder and flag, throw the eye into an agitated state.

An-My Lê, Milani Studio (Block of Stone), Vicenza, Italy, 1991. © An-My Lê, courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris, and London.

Lost in this play of line and haze, it is hard not to think of Gilbert Stuart’s unfinished Athenaeum Portrait of George Washington (1796), which became the template for numerous copies and engravings. In Stuart’s painting, Washington’s highly rendered face is surrounded by a field of sketchy brushwork and raw canvas, with evidence of the picture’s former frame in a faded oval. Both Lê and Stuart’s portraits contain these concentric zones of finish, moving from concentration to void and from illusionism to spontaneity; Stuart’s hurried brushstrokes around Washington reveal the artist’s hand in the same way that Lê’s wide view of the photography studio reveals the institutional production of a portrait, the abstracted and anonymous backgrounds allowing for more specific and patriotic insertions by the portraitist. Is it fair to refer to Lê’s picture as unfinished? While Stuart’s portrait was left half-painted in order to fulfill future commissions without the burden of arranging more sittings with Washington, Lê’s negative is fully developed, printed, and reproduced in the catalogue. Yet the lieutenant commander has not sat for his final picture, and our eyes wander over the print, waiting for resolution, wanting the subject to meet our gaze, the illusion to take hold...READ MORE