De l’intericonicité comme espace et temps (ré)créatif : les Video Portraits de Robert Wilson

Robert Wilson’s Video Portraits series (2004-2013, ongoing) displays a type of intericonic work which interweaves several layers of iconicity. Even if his first Video Portraits pictured famous and ordinary people and animals, it is when he lays his eyes upon celebrities that he almost systematically resorts to intericonic doubles. Robert Downey Jr. is thus depicted as the corpse in Rembrandt’s “anatomy lesson”; Jeanne Moreau impersonates Mary Stuart; Lady Gaga poses as Marat in his bath. These few examples illustrate, on the surface, the artist’s fondness for the juxtapositions of classical masterpieces and contemporary images from tabloid covers. They more profoundly question pictorial codes, our own gaze upon those popular icons, and our relationship to images.Wilson interrogates the tradition of the grand portrait: through the resemantization of two images (each icon in a pair produces a commentary on the other) and the form of these portraits—videos that are some 10 minutes long, in which the subjects are almost motionless—he reveals fascinating aspects of the art of portraiture. This paper studies the mechanics of production of intericonicity in these (almost) moving images by analyzing the modes of intericonicity, the temporal aspects, and the conditions of reception of these works.